As most of the country embraces the sweltering summer heat outdoors, citizens crank up their air conditioning indoors to compensate. And, in the effort of examining every little nook and cranny of our lives for efficiency and sustainability, the warmth had me wondering: Is it possible to recycle my air filter?

Alabama-based Filta-Tec offers to clean and recycle air filters for its clients. According to the Filta-Tec website, a brand new air filter doesn’t immediately work at maximum efficiency. After 15% to 20% of its lifespan is complete, the filter has built up enough “pre-coat” to work its best.

The folks at Filta-Tec claim that a recycled air filter is superior to a standard air filter, that it will lower your costs and that it will last longer than other filters. The recycled air filters you receive from Filta-Tec are cleaned in house, tested, bagged and sent back to you. Their recycling program can save you money and unnecessary waste.

The Fresh Air Club takes your old air filters for recycling and sends you new ones. This is good for the environment, as air filters are made from cardboard, fiberglass and metals that can be reused. The Fresh Air Club will send you a new air filter made from recycled materials, and the organization has pledged to plant one tree for each air filter it receives for recycling. According to the club’s website, its filters are also made in the U.S.

Wyoming-based American Filter Clean will also clean old air filters of any size and return them to you. This company not only accepts all round and square filters for cleaning, but it also cleans industrial vacuum filters, HEPA filters, dust reclamation filters and more.

Before you toss your old filter in the garbage this summer, try an option that saves it from the landfill. Have you found any way to reuse your old air conditioning filters?

Energy Star recommends that household air filters be changed every three months, because a dirty air filter can cause your heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) system to run less efficiently due to the build-up of debris. So, along with saving energy, you can prevent your family and guests from breathing in less pollution by abiding by these air filter maintenance guidelines.

Now that you may be more inclined to change your air filter regularly, it makes the job easier to know that the Fresh Air Club delivers new air filters and recycles old ones for you.

Joni Bock is the co-founder and CEO of the Fresh Air Club, and she is also a nurse, pet owner and mother, which further drove her passion to increase homeowners’ overall health via air quality. The Fresh Air Club provides members with superior filtration so they no longer have to breathe in dust, dander and dirt all while supplying them with air filters that are cheaper than retail store brands. Convenient delivery is a part of the deal as well!

As long as you’re located in the 48 contiguous United States, the Fresh Air Club can send you up to four air filters every 30, 60 or 90 days — your preference. You can compare plans easily to see which one is right for you. The air filters are high-efficiency, pleated-panel MERV-11 designs.

According to the EPA, air filters with a MERV rating between 7 and 13 are almost as effective as a HEPA filter. From dust mites, bacteria and mold, to pollen and pet dander, these air filters are constructed to capture harmful particles living in your air space.

The deal gets greener because The Fresh Air Club also provides recycling as a part of its services. All you have to do is place the dirty air filters in a pre-addressed, postage-paid mailer and call FedEx so they get delivered properly to the Fresh Air Club’s recycling center. Since close to 300 million air filters are thrown away annually, it’s important to recycle residential air filters and keep them out of landfills.

The Fresh Air Club offers various options to customize your plan, and there is a wide selection of standard and over-sized air filter options. By changing your air filter regularly, you reduce your home’s energy consumption, and by recycling your dirty air filters, you’re completing a wonderfully eco-friendly cycle in your home every 30, 60 or 90 days.

Imagine buildings possessing both natural and industrial characteristics — the fresh green grass from the ground also found on the sides of multiple-story apartment complexes and offices. There would no longer be a lack of nature and greenery in cities, but Ceracasa’s Lifewall does more than simply improve aesthetics. Lifewall is a tile engineered to support a wide range of drip-irrigated plants, and it’s created specifically to work in harmony with Ceracasa’s Bionictile. Bionictile is another type of tile that filters pollution out of the air (particularly the nitrogen oxides from automobiles) using the sun’s UV rays and moisture in the atmosphere to turn it into fertilizer for the plants on the Lifewall tiles.

It’s similar to the symbiotic relationship that plants have in your backyard garden: Certain plants support others and vice versa. It’s a beautiful process in the garden, but on a grander scale with these “living” tiles.

Lifewall’s designer, Emilio Llobat, is marketing this tile globally and is opening the door to more contemporary and sustainable building designs. Bionictile is available in white, ivory, tobacco and gray, and is a low-maintenance ceramic tile. When working in conjunction with Lifewall tiles, the two create an eye-catching modular design and live vertical garden on buildings — it’s sustainability, architecture and art wrapped up into one.

More than 800 distributors across Spain sell Ceracasa products, and the company also has main international distributors. In order to install these ceramic tiles, a strong adhesive source or grout must be used to secure the tiles to a wall or exterior structure, and Ceracasa provides step-by-step instructions online.

But how eco-friendly are the Lifewall and Bionictile? According to Ceracasa, if about 200 buildings used these tiles, more than 400,000 people could breathe clean air free from nitrogen oxides for one year. The more buildings structured with these tiles, the less pollution in the air. As rooftop gardens have become increasingly popular for the urban gardener, Ceracasa is raising the bar and going sky high to reduce pollution in the city with Lifewall.

Another attractive aspect of biodiesel is that it’s easily made. It’s nontoxic and does not present any healthy hazards, so it can be mixed up right in your home kitchen. For directions on how to make your own biodiesel at home, read my blog entry. It’s easy, affordable and a fun way to teach your family the invaluable practice of reusing and recycling.

Biodiesel is a win-win solution because it not only reuses unwanted cooking oils, but it is also much better for the environment:

• Biodiesel reduces toxic components that are released into the environment and have been shown to cause various types of cancers.
• Biodiesel produces 78% less greenhouse gasses (CO₂) than conventional diesel fuel.
• Biodiesel is three times more energy efficient than conventional diesel fuel. Conventional diesel fuel produces 0.89 units of energy for every unit of fuel while biodiesel produces 3.2 unites of energy for every unit of fuel.
• Biodiesel comes from the earth (primarily vegetables) so it is nontoxic and extremely biodegradable.

Although, my family and I aren’t able to create our own biodiesel just yet (we don’t have a diesel engine), when we purchase our next vehicle I’m going to make sure it is able to run on biodiesel. For people who work in the food industry or know someone who does, you may be able to acquire large amounts of used vegetable oil used for frying for free. This could virtually eliminate your financial costs of operating your vehicle. Biodiesel is a sure way to save money and save the planet.

Like many people who live in New York City, I don’t own a car. Aside from being more trouble and expense than they’re worth in a city with comprehensive public transportation, cars are, of course, major polluters. So, not only do I save myself time and money by not driving, but I can also feel good about pumping less global warming-causing carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

The times I have driven in the five years since I moved to New York have almost all been while I was on vacation. It’s made sense to rent or borrow a car while I was in places far from home — Seattle, Dallas, San Francisco and Mexico — but what about the trips I take in the Northeast? There are a ton of great vacation destinations within reasonable driving distance of New York (among them: Maine, Cape Cod, Boston and Vermont) and now that the leaves are getting close to changing, I’ve definitely starting thinking about how nice it would be to have an eco-friendly vehicle to take on road trips.

Hybrid cars like the Prius are starting to become fairly ubiquitous, but I’ve always been interested in cars that are even more radical, like those that have been converted to run on vegetable oil. Here are some things I’ve learned about veggie oil-powered vehicles:

• You can buy kits to convert a car yourself from retailers like Frybrid and Greasecar. The kits range from a few hundred dollars to about $1,000.
• If you don’t want to do the dirty work, there are also companies, such as Funhad, that specialize in converting standard vehicles to SVO (straight vegetable oil) or WVO (waste vegetable oil).
• It’s estimated that veggie oil-powered vehicles emit about half the emissions of standard vehicles.
• Most standard diesel engine cars and trucks can be easily converted to run on WVO, while some can even run on SVO without conversion. A few people have even converted buses and RVs!
• You can find vats of used vegetable oil at restaurants (Asian restaurants seem to be popular choices) and from online sources like Good Grease, which buys and sells vegetable oil to power cars, and FillUp4Free.com, which maps locations where oil is available

Pretty interesting stuff, huh? I could definitely see myself taking in the beauty of New England country roads in a car that runs on vegetable oil. It seems appropriate somehow.