A Sustainable New Year - The Best Green Apps Part 4 Travel

Travel/outdoors

30. Drinking Water -- 99 cents

Ditch bottled water while visiting Rome with Drinking Water, which maps out the position of more than 200 drinkable fountains.

31. Geocaching Toolkit -- Free

Geocaching, the green outdoors game of hiding and seeking treasures, has caught on throughout the world. Geocaching Toolkit guides players between locations with clues involving puzzles, calculations and projecting a new waypoint using distances and bearings. Sometimes the calculations are easy, but this toolkit can help when calculations become tedious.

32. iLocate -- 99 cents

iLocate is a comprehensive searchable database of national and local parks, beaches, theme parks and amusement parks throughout the U.S. You'll find contact directions and details on each park.

33. Lonely Planet Travel Guides -- Prices begin at 99 cents

Lonely Planet Travel Guides are the guide of choice for many frugal and green travelers. Various apps provide paperless guides for both U.S. and international destinations. Some of the guides are buggy and need work, but Lonely Planet is working on updated versions. Tip: Read the reviews before buying.

34. Peterson Field Guide to Backyard Birds -- $2.99

The final word in bird guides comes to iPhone in a bigger and better format. The Peterson Field Guide to Backyard Birds allows you to view bird images, listen to recorded bird songs and calls, run a filtered search by species for your geographic area, and more. All information is taken from the latest edition of the best-selling Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America.

A Sustainable New Year - The Best Green Apps Part 3 Dining Out

In honor of 2011, here are 50 eco-friendly apps, all found in the iTunes app store to help you be more green as you shop, travel, transport, eat and much more.


Dining out/Dining in

26. FoodMenus -- 99 cents

FoodMenus is a searchable, location-based database of over 100,000 menus from restaurants across the U.S. that helps you make smart eating choices before you hit a restaurant or order take-out. You also can save your favorite menus for offline use and share them with friends.

27. Green Sushi Selector -- 99 cents

Green Sushi Selector allows you to research whether the sushi fish you're about to buy comes from threatened species or has been caught or farmed in ways harmful to the environment. Fish are listed both by their Japanese and common-market names. Additional features include health alerts for mercury and PCBs, as well as dietary recommendations.

28. Seafood Watch -- Free

It's remarkable how little we know and are told about the seafood we eat. Seafood Watch, from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, is a searchable guide to the quality and origination point of seafood at grocery stores and restaurants.

29. VegOut -- $2.99

Vegetarian offerings in many restaurants are often limited and boring. VegOut makes life a bit easier with the world's largest international listing of vegan, vegetarian and vegetarian-friendly restaurants. Search listings by your exact location or a customized location when on the road.



Thanks to Coupon Sherpa for assembling this list.

A Sustainable New Year - The Best Green Apps Part 2

THE  BEST  SUSTAINABLE  APPS


In honor of 2011, here are 50 eco-friendly apps, all found in the iTunes app store to help you be more gree as you shop, travel, transport, eat and much more.


Transportation

14. CarCare -- $4.99

CarCare automatically calculates your gas mileage at the pump and reminds you when it's time to change the oil, rotate tires, get a wax or any other service you desire.

15. Carticipate -- Free

Hook up to a social network of folks who want to share rides. Just plug in your destination and Carticipate finds others in your social network headed in the same direction. You can hitch a ride or share your own vehicle.

16. GasBag -- Basic version Free; Pro version 99 cents

GasBag relies on a community of hundreds of thousands of users submitting prices across the U.S.,U.K. and Australia, with price updates delivered to your phone in real-time. You also can track your car's mileage and record details of gas purchases.

17. Green Gas Saver -- Free

Green Gas Saver tells you when you're accelerating or taking a turn too fast, which can hinder your gas mileage. The idea behind the app is to keep the ball in the center of the screen. When you accelerate too quickly, the diameter of the ball increases and an alarm will sound, indicating you're accelerating too quickly. Green Gas also keeps a running score so you can see how well you're driving in real time. A few weeks with this app and driving efficiently will become ingrained.

A Sustainable New Year - The Best Green Apps Part 1 Shopping

In honor of 2011, here are 50 eco-friendly apps, all found in the iTunes app store to help you be more gree as you shop, travel, transport, eat and much more.

Shop:

1. Animal-Free -- Free

Animal-Free is a pocket reference guide for many common and hidden animal ingredients. Whether you're vegan,vegetarian, part-time veg or simply trying to shop veg-friendly, this app by Symbiotic Software will help you make conscientious shopping decisions. New vegans will appreciate the list of commonly misunderstood or unfamiliar vegan ingredients that will help expand your dietary horizons.

2. CouponSherpa -- Free

Ditch the pounds of coupon pages cluttering your refrigerator and wallet. This mountain-climbing superhero provides hundreds of in-store mobile coupons to streamline your savings. CouponSherpa gives you access to the hottest deals on clothing, shoes, restaurants, electronics, travel, jewelry, sporting goods, books and more.

3. CraigsMobileList -- 99 cents

Is there anything greener than CraigsList? Yep, CraigsMobileList allows you to search, browse, post and respond to ads on your iPhone. You also can track items you need, are donating or selling. Version 2.0 is a complete overhaul of the original, including a groundbreaking housing-search interface.

A Sustainable New Year - Sustainable Tech

Getting Over Our Two-Year Itch

By DAVID POGUE

Published: December 31, 2010

Every year, we buy zillions of music players, digital cameras and cellphones — and then, a couple of years later, send them to the nearest trash bin. “New every two” isn’t just Verizon’s offer to sell you a new, discounted phone every 24 months; it also describes the average person’s consumption habits for cameras, phones and other gadgets.

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Unfortunately, no matter how well intentioned the consumer, it’s hard to fulfill that pledge to recycle, at least when it comes to electronic gadgetry. The phrase “sustainable electronics manufacturing” is almost an oxymoron, like “humble actor.”

That’s because the electronics industry itself is built upon frequent renewal. The iPhone, iPod or iPad you buy today will be obsolete within a year. Every pocket camera model on sale today will no longer be sold six months from now. And Android phones — forget it. They seem to come out every Friday afternoon.