Wrap your gifts up right by using smart boxes made of recycled materials. Afraid that things will look a bit too, well, brown? Purchase spools of beautiful vintage ribbon to help tie some color and some style onto all of your packages. While you’re at it, why stop with just gifts? Consider using vintage ribbon to decorate your bouquets, centerpieces and, in the case of weddings, your aisle, too.

In my pre-blogger days, I spent way too much time on airlines and always wondered about what the airlines do with their waste. Sometimes they collect the cans and newspapers separately, sometimes they don’t. I have asked flight attendents not to give me the paper napkin, they do anyway, I have asked them to just put water in my water bottle, sometimes they do, but mostly they don’t.

Whenever visiting a public, I’m always left feeling unsure of which hand drying method is more green: a hand dryer or paper towels. Neither method is particularly environmentally friendly but a debate many of you have probably thought of at one point.

So how does Spokane commute?

Several years ago, the National Transportation Policy project said walkers account for 8.5 percent of trips locally and bicycles are used in 0.8 percent of trips. That compares with a rate of 1.4 r for bicycle use in other cities. (About one-third of Americans and 30 percent of Washingtonians do not drive at all.) The big shocker: Vehicles are still used 85 percent of the time in Spokane. The study concluded Spokane’s surface transportation system has not kept pace with the growth the area has experienced in the past several decades and the lower participation rates for pedestrians and mainly bicycles indicated an opportunity to obtain a significant shift from vehicle to non-motorized models.