French press. Bodum Chambord’s elegant but inexpensive model (pictured left) makes delicious coffee; the Columbia design contains the coffee in a thermal carafe to keep the beverage warm without the need for an electric hot plate.

Chemex manual drip coffeepots. This hourglass-shaped flask can use recycled paper filters. Make as little as one cup of coffee, or as many as ten.

Chef’s Choice electric French press plus. This environmentally-friendly technology combines the French press and an energy-saving electric kettle in one pot.

One-cup coffeemakers. These efficient pots can brew coffee in less than a minute, eliminating the need to prepare a whole pot. Check the housewares section of Target, Wal-Mart, or your local department store.   

When buying a new coffeemaker:

Consider how much coffee you consume at any given time. If you drink only one cup of coffee in the morning, and maybe one again in the evening, don’t buy a machine that automatically brews eight or ten or twelve cups. You’ll be wasting energy, water, coffee-and ultimately, money.

Get a carafe. Do you sip coffee sporadically through the morning or afternoon? Rather than keep a pot warm on an electric hot plate, buy a good insulated carafe to keep your “joe” hot through the end of the day.

Looking for an electric-drip appliance? Choose one that shuts off automatically.

And if you like to grind your own beans, try:

Danesco manual coffee grinder. A stainless steel grinder with a clip canister, it lets you grind coffee beans fine or coarse using no kilowatts but your own.

 Wondering what kind of coffee to buy? We’ve already figured it out!

What about your mug? Look here.

The post How Eco Is Your Coffee Pot? appeared first on Big Green Purse.

But what if sources for the medicines that haven’t been developed yet are destroyed before they have a chance to be discovered?

The notion isn’t farfetched. Rainforests are losing an area about half the size of Florida each year. Temperate groves, like the kind we’re more likely to find in our national forests, are also under siege. So are the wetlands, streams, rivers, lakes, meadows, and plains that harbor thousands of untested but potentially medicinal plants.

A new study (you can find it in our Latest News column) by the National Cancer Institute reports that at least 70 percent of all new drugs introduced in the U.S. in the past 25 years came from Nature.

In fact, David Newman and Gordon Cragg, the study’s authors, found that about half of all anti-cancer drugs introduced since the 1940s are either natural products or medicines derived directly from natural products.

What does this have to do with your big green purse?

You can help protect Nature and her life-saving plants by spending your money on products that make a difference. Buying shade grown coffee keeps rainforests intact. Choosing recycled paper products reduces the need to clearcut temperate forests. Not purchasing chemical-intensive fertilizer so you can garden organically will protect wetlands and waterways.

When you use your money to keep Nature alive, ultimately you may be keeping yourself alive, too.

The post Are We Bulldozing Medicines Before We Discover Them? appeared first on Big Green Purse.