The UK's transport secretary has just rolled out a program aimed at luring people out of their greenhouse gas-producing cars and onto zero-emissions bicycles.

A story today by the Environmental News Service says the Brits will spend the equivalent of $197.4 million U.S. dollars to do things such as add cycling lanes to roads, increase bicycle parking, teach cycling to children and promote the benefits of cycling.

She named Bristol at the UK's first Cycling City, to be joined by 11 other "Cycling Demonstration Towns."

For more about bicycling in this region, check out the website of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, which also is promoting cycling as a healthy and eco-friendly form of transportation.

Today, Home Depot announced a recycling program for compact fluorescent light bulbs.

The bulbs, which are considered environmentally friendly because they use 75 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs, nevertheless need to be recycled because they contain small amounts of mercury.

Ikea has been accepting the bulbs, but beyond that, recycling options have been few and far between.

Now, customers can bring any expired, unbroken CFL bulbs to any of the nation’s 1,973 Home Depot stores and give them to the store associate behind the returns desk.

The company said in a statement that the bulbs “will then be managed responsibly by an environmental management company who will coordinate CFL packaging, transportation and recycling to maximize safety and ensure environmental compliance.”

Senior vice president Ron Jarvis termed the effort “the first national solution to providing Americans with a convenient way to recycle CFLs.”

The Home Depot sold over 75 million CFLs in 2007, which saved Americans approximately $4.8 billion in energy costs and 51.8 billion pounds in CO2 greenhouse gases over the life of the bulbs, according to the company.

Dissent over the eco-friendliness of bottled water has reached the boiling point, if you will, in recent months.

Americans sure love the stuff. We swigged 8.25 billion gallons in 2006 - an average of 28 gallons per person.

But some decry the energy consumed in transporting it long distances — like from Fiji.

And the petroleum that goes into the plastic.

And the litter that results when too many of us just toss the bottles in the trash.

And so on.

Bottlers point to the convenience of water in a bottle. They say its leads to healthier drink choices and a healthier population.

And the plastic in the bottles has been drastically used.

And so on.

Lately, America’s mayors have begun to look at the issue. After all, hefty funding goes into public water systems. How does it look if cities diss the very stuff coming from their taps by buying bottled? Not to mention the landfill costs when their citizenry litters or tosses.

Now, the august U.S. Conference of Mayors has spoken.

Today in Miami, at the annual national meeting, they passed a resolution.

Did they endorse bottled water and take their lumps with enviros?

Did they decry bottled water and take their lumps with the bottlers?

I guess this is what politics is all about. It was a resolution “supporting municipal water systems.”

And it concludes: The US Conference of Mayors encourages cities to phase out, where feasible, government use of bottled water and promote the importance of municipal water.

Encourages? Where feasible? Phase out? Promote?

Which stikes me as kind of watered down, if you will, from either side of the debate.

I’ve been so pleased with my front-loading washer because it saves so much water.

Until I read this article in the British Daily Mail.

It’s about a British inventors who have developed a washer that uses about a cup of water. Somehow, the addition of plastic chips (wouldn’t it be nice if they were ground up recycled bottles?) to the cycle helps get rid of the dirt.

It not only saves water (and a lot of it, enough in a single day to fill 145 Olympic sized swimming pools).  It also means the clothes dry faster.

Xeros Ltd, a company created to develop and market the machine, says it could be on the market next year.

In this morning's GreenSpace column, I wrote about a Carnegie Mellon study about the American diet.

Environmentalists have been trying to get people to eat locally-sourced food — spinach from down the street instead of asparagus from Peru.

But researcher Chris Weber concluded that transportation only accounts for 11 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions related to our diets. He found that the best way to reduce your dietary impact is to eat less meat.

If you want to compare, here’s his breakdown of the average American diet, by calorie content:

25 percent cereals and carbohydrates
8 percent chicken/fish/eggs
11 percent dairy
9 percent fruits and vegetables
38 percent oils and sweets
9 percent red meat, including pork

One of the problems with red meat is the methane emitted by "ruminants," such as beef and pork. If you don't believe it, visit this EPA website that ranks methane-emitters.  "Enteric fermentation" is third.  Want to guess No. 8? Rice cultivation. Amazing.

In reporting the story, I wound up talking to — but not writing about — a vegan, Victoria Crompton, of Wilmington.
I thought her story was interesting.

Crompton initially started eating more vegetables after she became concerned about the conditions many farm animals live in.

Later, she became concerned about health issues related to meat.

Finally, she “found out what an environmentally devastating issue meat production is as well,” and pretty soon she wasn’t eating anything animal-derived at all. Not even eggs. Or honey.
“The three threads all meshed,” she told me.

I asked her if it was difficult, and she said it wasn’t.

She said most people don’t eat as varied a diet as you might expect, and it’s a more or less simple matter of taking a family’s everyday recipes and modifying them.

Her own specialty is spaghetti with vegetarian “meatballs.” She serves it at gatherings, and no one notices, other than to say it tastes delicious.

Crompton has been vegan for five years now.

“I just didn’t realize my food choices were as significant an environmental choice as they’ve turned out to be,” she said.

Myself? I’m still eating meat. But I swear, I’m cutting back.

For someone who depends so heavily on technology to do her job, I can be a real Luddite when it comes to my private life.

That, I suppose, is why it took me so long to begin paying my bills online.

But I’ve been doing it for a few months now, and it’s been great. No glitches! In fact, it’s been a cinch.

First, I set up my account with my financial institution by listing and providing account numbers for everyone I normally pay bills to — PECO, the phone company, the trash hauler, etc.
Now, I just log on, select the company, the amount and the date I want to pay them and push a button. Presto! It’s done.

It doesn’t even take as along as writing a check, and I don’t have to pay for a stamp. (Not to mention whatever share of the fuel needed for the mail delivery trucks to take my payment wherever it’s going.)

Plus, I can take care of the bill when it comes in, but tell my financial institution not to pay it until it actually comes due. How easy is that?

If I should ever be stranded in Paris or marooned on a tropical island, as long as I had internet access, I could still pay my bills. (As if that would be at the top of my mind.)

Anyway, millions of pounds of paper annually go for bills, and who can doubt it? Collect what you get yourself in a month, and you’ll see.

PECO, by the way, has a calculator for electronic bill payment. It says that if I get and pay four bills a month electronically, in a year I’ll save $20.16 in postage (well, only half that if I just count the stamp I’d stick on the outgoing envelope) and spare the world three pounds of carbon.

If just 100,000 of PECO’s customers signed up for paperless billing, according to the calculator, it would be like planting 150 trees, and having 33 fewer cars on the road.

So this week I took a deep breath and a big step. I dedided to sign up to get my bills electronically as well. I was a little nervous about this. I thought I might miss some due dates. But we’ll see.

I hope a few trees will be thanking me.

Kudos upon kudos to Laura Wright, who has helped me out of a mess.

A few months ago — with Earth Day approaching — my mail carrier must have been getting a hernia. The onslaught  of “green” how-to books was impressive, mind-boggling and almost frightening. What about all the trees they were printed on?

And isn’t there a disconnect between green-ness and lets-go-shopping titles like “Big Green Purse” and “The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices?”  (Okay, we all need to buy things from time to time, but it’s still worth noting that rampant consumerism contributes to the whole planetary mess.)

I thought maybe I could blog occaionally about them. Start an occasional series: “From My Bookshelf.” Especially since I now have 19 of them on the shelf, and at least three more in my car, and maybe another one or two at home.

But Laura Wright, book editor of the magazine OnEarth, has beaten me to it, writing a charming and informative column in the current issue about the green tide of self-help books.

Wright is big on personal gain, and you can count me in as well. “The books that rise to the top are those that have married the environmental benefits of efficiency, reduced consumption and recycling with the American idea of perpetual self-improvement,” she writes.

Her personal favorite —  at least, the one that left her feeling the most hopeful — was David Balch’s “Go Green, Live Rich.”

“Bach socks you in the wallet,” she writes. “I learned a lot about just how much — in dollars and cents — I could do for ME while doing something good for everyone.”

Hmmm. I have that book, too. It’s thick with tips and online sources for more information and dollar amounts for savings. For instance, adjusting your thermostat up (in summer) or down (in winter) will save about $114 on energy bills, he says. Not bad.

I’ve also gravitated to “Living Like Ed” by Ed Begley because it’s so full of info.

And the delightful “Seven Wonders for a Cool Planet” by  Eric Sorensen, who counts the condom, “a remarkable little device,” among them.  He says it “will spare thousands, if not millions, of people from life-threatening disease and unwanted pregnancies.” And, presumably, put the brakes on overpopulation.

“So what to make of this pile of books?” Wright finally wonders.  “Can adopting environmental values improve my physical fitness and financial security and even make me happier?”

Read her and find out.

Got an automatic dishwasher? You may be harming the planet with the soap you use in it.

So we can all welcome a bit of news lately about legislative action in Pennsylvania governing, of all things, that very soap.

For now, it contains phosophorus, which gets into waterways and, acting like the fertilizer that it’s often a component of, causes blooms of algae and other aquatic growth. The plant life, in turn, sucks the oxygen out of the water and fish may die. Or mats of greenery on top of the water will kill everything underneath.

As usual: All sorts of problems when things get out of balance.

About two years ago when I was writing about the Wissahickon Creek, a Department of Environmental Protection official told me phosophorus was a big problem in the stream.

According to a 1998 study, the phosophorus content in some stretches of the stream was ten times above what a healthy stream should have.

To the algae of the Wissahickon, “it’s like Thanksgiving dinner every day,” the official said.

The DEP and the federal Environmental Protection Agency are looking at ways to control it.

The rationale is economic as well as environmental. Algae gives the water an “off” odor and taste, and the Philadelphia Water Department, which has a drinking water intake just below the Wissahickon’s convergence with the Schuylkill, spends buckets of money — $200,000 or more — just to correct that aesthetic issue.

If phosphorus sounds familiar, it was banned from laundry detergents in Pennsylvania in 1989.  Why exempt dishwasher detergent? At the time there weren’t many automatic dishwashers, and there were no economical alternatives to phosphorus in dishwasher detergent. So it stayed at levels of up to 8.7 percent — about the same as in a common houseplant fertilizer.

Recently, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell signed legislation banning it by July 1, 2010, except in detergents used in commercial or institutional dishwashers.

(Not to worry about the industry, which has already set corresponding voluntary standards, says Harry Campbell, a scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, which applauds the move because phosphorus is a huge issue in the bay as well. The legislation simply codifies the standard, he said.)

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the phosphorus front, back in April, New Jersey DEP commissioner Lisa Jackson signed a memorandum of understanding with members of the lawn-care industry, who pledged to reduce the amount of phosophorus released in fertilizers sold in the state. It’s going down 50 percent by 2010.

That's the count for the past 24 hours. I can still hear on buzzing around somewhere, but I can't find it.

At least there don't seem to be many on the second floor any more. Maybe it just got too hot for them.

As of last night at about 9 p.m., here was the temperature gradient:

Outside: 82 degrees.

Second floor: 89.1

First floor (with air-conditioning): 78

Basement: 63.9

But I'm still not sleeping down there. The first floor was just fine.