What: Staple-free stapler

Features: This ingenious little tool stitches (up to five) pieces of paper together, eliminating the need for staples on packets containing five or less sheets. It’s cute, safe for smaller hands and it means that the days of having to pick staples out of page corners before recycling (or shredding) are over!

Green Factor: The staple-free stapler never needs to be refilled, makes paper recycling a bit easier.

Bonus: Greenraising offers eco-friendly fundraising items–check out their website for more information.

Find It Here: Greenraising

This Week’s Giveaway: LunchBots for Waste-Free Lunches

What: 16 oz. reusable coffee cup

Features: Made of double-walled porcelain to keep beverages hot and has a matching silicone sleeve to keep hands cool and a silicone lid.

Green Factor: Bringing your own cup to your favorite coffee place or to work can keep a LOT of nasty styrofoam cups out of the waste stream and save trees by eliminating use of paper cups and sleeves and silicone features are non-toxic.

Bonus: They come in three cool graphic patterns and they’re reasonably priced.

Find It Here: Amazon.com

What: Paper CD holders

Features: Instead of plastic jewel cases, store loose CD’s in these paper sleeves, made from recycled chip board

Green Factor: Each sleeve is 100% recycled, made up of 56% post-consumer content and is processed chlorine-free

Bonus: A pack of five sleeves costs less than $5!

Find It Here: BuyGreen

What: Paper Culture modern announcements, cards, stationary and more.

Features: Exclusive announcements, invitations, cards and stationary personalized just for you! With inspiration taken from brands like Kate Spade and Marc Jacobs, each Paper Culture design is fresh and unique, printed on high-quality card stock and backed by a 100% Customer Satisfaction Guarantee

Green Factor: Paper Culture’s entire catalog is printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper that was produced using wind power. Envelopes and packaging are made from recycled material, and best of all? Paper Culture plants a tree for every order they receive!

Bonus: Save time & headaches by using their Mail & Message service–you cover the postage and leave the rest to Paper Culture. They’ll address, stamp and mail your cards on your behalf! Wow! Check their web site for more details.

Find It Here: Paper Culture

Win It: We’ve partnered with Paper Culture to give away THREE $25 voucher codes for the Paper Culture web site to THREE lucky winners!

Click here to fill out our simple entry form. Just enter PC05 as the giveaway name and name two ‘Life Events’ that Paper Culture creates designs for. Giveaway ends 05/31/10; $25 value. Open to US residents only. Official Rules

What: Biodegradable pens and pencils

Features: From Paper Mate comes a line of pens and mechanical pencils that are almost completely biodegradable and compostable. While the refill and grip are not yet biodegradable, the outer casing, which makes up the majority of the instrument, breaks down in about a year.

Green Factor: Comes in plastic-free, all paper packaging. Made from corn-based materials and plant-derived sugar. Click here to see how they break down – it’s neat!

Bonus: These pens and pencils are refillable and thus reusable, too!

Find It Here: Paper Mate

Win It: We’ve partnered with Paper Mate to give away $25 worth of biodegradable pens and pencils to one lucky winner!

Click here to fill out our simple entry form. Just enter PM05 as the giveaway name and tell us the four colors the biodegradable pens come in! Giveaway ends 05/12/10; $25 value. Open to US residents only. Official Rules. Giveaway closed.

On our Blog: The Pollution INSIDE Your Home

What: USB rechargeable batteries

Features: The numbers are staggering—over fifteen billion batteries are tossed into the trash each year, yet now more than ever, batteries are in demand. From Moxia Energy comes a forward-thinking solution: USBCELLs, batteries that can be charged via a USB port, allowing you to recharge virtually anywhere, without having to rely on a portable charger. Currently available are AA’s, with triple A’s, 9V and cell phone batteries on the way

Green Factor: With proper use, USBCELLs can be charged several hundred times before losing capacity, saving you money and reducing your household waste output! Batteries are sent back to the company (free of charge if you’re in the UK!) for recycling

Bonus: Check their web site – it’s packed with information on the batteries, their various uses, how to recycle them and much more.

Find It Here: USBCELL

What: Paper Loop Greeting Cards

Features: L.A.-based Paper Loop is an eco-friendly, wholesale stationary company that offers up a variety of fun and funky greeting cards for all occasions

Green Factor: Using recycled paper and envelopes, biodegradable sleeves, wind-powered printing and domestic suppliers are ways this company keeps it green

Bonus: Can be found in the US, Canada, the UK, Chile and Japan; will ship via buyer’s preference

Find It Here: Paper Loop

Remember floppy disks? Yeah, the plastic ones that stored about a megabyte of data… These days, we have nifty USB drives to store data and about a thousand times more of it, which is cool, but how about USB drives made from something a bit more natural than say, plastic? Earthimprints takes a greener approach by offering them in walnut, maple, bamboo and redwood finishes. These pocket-sized drives are great not only for consumers, but for businesses, too. They’re an item that computer users either rely on now or will eventually need. With that in mind, they’d make great (read: useful) promotional items—I mean does anyone really need another keychain? Instead of giving away a bunch of plastic junk, entice potential clients & customers with non-plastic 1, 2, 4 and 8gb USB drives they’ll not only appreciate, but will actually use, too.

Find It Here: earthimprints

On Our Blog:  Bite on This: More Grocery Store Secrets

I remember when compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL’s) hit the shelves a few years ago. Despite their  high price tag I thought they were a fabulous idea (longer lasting, better for the environment, etc.), but when I found out that they contained small amounts of mercury, I began to wonder if using CFL’s was the most responsible choice for me to make, for both the environment and my family.

But here’s a bright idea: Clear-Lite, a small company in Florida, is introducing a new, environmentally friendly light bulb this summer called ArmorLite. What’s so great about these bulbs, you ask? Well, they help reduce glare, allowing consumers to see more clearly but even better, they just so happen to prevent mercury from becoming airborne if one breaks.

Each ArmorLite bulb is covered with an unbreakable silicone skin that prevents the mercury inside the bulb (and teeny, tiny little shards of glass) from spreading upon impact, making them safer to use and dispose of. The bulbs have a smaller amount of mercury than regular CFL’s and are also made with a mercury amalgam – the same stuff that dentists use for fillings.

Of course, they last longer than regular bulbs and qualify for the Energy Star program, as well, so while you’re seeing more clearly and not poisoning anyone with mercury, you’re also saving money and energy. WIN!

Find It Here: Clear-Lite 56xjsh79uq

Telecommuting. It’s a big buzzword these days but what does it actually mean? Well, in a nutshell, it means using the wonders of technology to work from home instead of getting in your car and driving to a workplace. It’s a bit of a departure from our usual fare but given the current job market, the cost of gas, and our love of all things eco-friendly we thought it would make for an interesting feature because telecommuting IS green.

Allow me to dazzle you with some factoids—according to the Consumer Electronics Association, a person telecommuting one day per week can reduce carbon emissions by 37-50 pounds per day. If that person telecommuted five days per week, the savings would be equivalent to the electricity consumed by an average household in 4 to 6 months. In addition to reducing carbon emissions, telecommuting can improve work/life balance, reduce stress (goodbye traffic!) and save you money on things like gas, wardrobe, dry cleaning, and buying lunch.

One excellent resource for finding telecommuting work is FlexJobs, an ethically-run service started by a green-centric mom who was frustrated with how difficult it was to locate real telecommuting opportunities among all the scams. FlexJobs finds and presents the best legitimate telecommuting opportunities (150-200 researched new job listings posted each week) in a well-designed, searchable web interface. Jobseekers pay a small monthly or yearly fee for access to the FlexJobs site but The Green Mom Review thinks telecommuting is so awesome that we’re giving way a one year subscription!

Find It Here: FlexJobs

Win It: We’re giving away a one year subscription to FlexJobs. Click here to fill out our simple entry form. Just enter FJ3 as the giveaway name and provide the answer to this question: What is FlexJobs’ mission? Enter by 3/23/09. $49.95 value. Contest closed. Congrats Kathy!

Teaching young kids how to power down the computer is a great way to help them understand the importance of saving energy. Now there is a fun and easy way to do that - the turnOFFtool. Created by a team of Stanford students for a school project, the turnOFFtool was inspired by discussions with parents who expressed how difficult it is for a young child to remember all the steps involved in shutting a computer down. The turnOFFtool, which is free and can be downloaded to your computer in a matter of minutes, bypasses all of the steps it usually takes for you to turn off your computer. Instead, all you have to do is click on a little moon icon which is always available on the screen (or minimized at the bottom of your screen). When you click on the moon, your computer will automatically shut down - or you can easily set it to sleep, if you prefer. Currently, the tool only runs on Windows, but future versions will work with Macs, too, and will allow users to add text or sound effects and select their own picture. For the record, though, we think the moon image with the zzzz’s couldn’t be cuter more appropriate for kids to get the “sleep” metaphor. Bravo, Stanford guys — we likey!

Find It Here: turnOFFtool

Eco Fact: According to the Harvard Green Campus Initiative, leaving a computer on all day for a year could result in more than 1500 pounds of CO2 being released into the atmosphere. To put that into context, it would take 100-500 trees to offset that amount of extra CO2!

Since joining The Green Mom Review, I have made a concerted effort to better my family’s recycling habits. Cutting back on unnecessary printing and paper waste? Not so much. Luckily, I’ve found GreenPrint, which was created as a tool to help households and businesses reduce the amount of paper waste. Why? According to their ecofacts, “In 2004 the United States used 8 million tons of office paper (3.2 billion reams). That’s the equivalent of 178 million trees!” How does it work? GreenView displays and highlights wasteful pages and page elements (like pages with just a URL, banner ad, logo, or legal jargon) and allows you choose to print only what you want. The software then removes images or text, creates a PDF file and has a reporting feature which keeps track of the number of pages and the amount of money you have saved. Once you know how much paper and money you’re saving, it’s kind of hard to imagine NOT using GreenPrint.

Find It Here: GreenPrint