A guest post by Sharon Tomasulo, from Library Hungry.

Adam’s been all about tea parties lately, so we got him this tea set. It’s from a company called Green Toys, which produces plastic toys made 100% from recycled milk jugs. The set is adorable, and we spent over an hour today drinking our water tea and adding spoonfuls of imaginary sugar to it.

Adam taking tea.

Other things to love about it: the whole thing (including raw materials) is made in the USA. It’s BPA-free, if you’re worried about things like that. The packaging is a) all cardboard and recyclable and b) very easy to get into, without twist ties or plastic fasteners. Also, even though the Amazon website has a blurb about teaching little girls to save the Earth while they pour their tea, the company website is pretty careful not to pigeonhole like that. Though they do seem to think that if a girl wants a tool kit, she wants it in pink.

Anyway, we’re very happy with this purchase. Especially Adam, who declares it “delightful, good, and delicious.”

Local news is at the top this week, from water chestnut removal to bike sharing to the Boston Green Fest.

• Water chestnut removal from Mystic River to commence – Somerville Journal. There are quite a lot of water chestnuts in the Charles River, too, and they’re sharp little buggers.
• Hubway Discounts! – Boston Biker. The bike sharing program is offering a reduced yearly fee and a free helmet for low-income Boston residents.
• Boston GreenFest 2011: Green Gone Bad – Boston Green Scene. I didn’t make it to GreenFest this year, but I’ve been disappointed by it in the past. The Boston Local Food Festival is much better.
• Can Jeremy Grantham Profit From Ecological Mayhem? – New York Times. This is some seriously long-term investment strategy. I think I have a crush on Jeremy Grantham.
• Will new insurance coverage make the intrauterine device America’s favorite contraceptive? – Slate. Great news: by 2013, insurance companies will have to provide IUDs (and other contraceptives) without a copay.
• Fresh and Direct From the Garden an Ocean Away – New York Times. This is why I’m always a little confused by a knee-jerk reaction against nonnative species: tomatoes aren’t native to Italy, and potatoes aren’t native to Ireland.
• Is taking notes on a notepad or an iPad more environmentally responsible? – Slate. Hint: it’s not the iPad.

A guest post by Sharon Tomasulo, from Library Hungry.

I got a new composter for my birthday! The one I got for a good price from Medford is decent, but it’s hard to stir up. Also, it’s almost full, and I don’t know what to do with my new compost as I wait for the old stuff to brew.

So, for my birthday, I got an Achla CMP-05 spinning composter. We couldn’t find it locally, so we bought it from Amazon. Adam helped us put it together, which was actually kind of fun, and very easy. He had a lot of fun spinning it before we loaded it up, though after we filled it I had to put my back into it to turn it.

Adam helps spin it.

It’s more of a batch composter, meaning it’s better to put a bunch of stuff in at the beginning and let it stew than to add more all the time. So we’ve been shoveling in the half-dirt, half-scrap mess from the old composter. We’ll let the new bin finish the compost off while we start a fresh batch in the old one. The advantage to this is that, since it’s already half-done, the moisture ratio is right and there’s no dripping, which I’ve heard can be a problem with one of these spinning ones if you put in too many greens.

It’s so satisfying to stop putting my kitchen scraps into the garbage. That few weeks between the old one filling up and the new one arriving were trauma. I have no use for compost, but my friend Liala is a super-gardener, and I’ll just had it off to her—she covets the stuff like cool water on a hot day. So it’s win-win, and I’m back on the Earth’s good side!

Now I never have to plug my Kindle into an outlet! For my birthday this year Mike and Sharon gave me a ReVIVE solar charger. I wouldn’t have bought it for myself, because I was skeptical about how well it would work, but it’s really proven its utility. I guess this is evidence (not proof!) for Sharon’s gift-giving philosophy.

It looks like a smartphone, but it's not.

This rechargeable battery pack can either draw its power from a normal wall socket or the sun. My Kindle doesn’t even have to be plugged into it while it’s storing electricity. Since I don’t have a window at work, I can leave the ReVIVE to charge at home while I read at lunch. It only takes a couple hours to get a decent charge and maybe half an hour to transfer that to the Kindle.

You can check if it's fully charged while it's suctioned to the window.

Compared to the outlet, the solar option only fills the battery up halfway, but that’s about half a charge for the Kindle, which already goes for almost a month at a time on a full battery. (The secret is turning off the wireless.)

No, this isn’t just for Kindles—it’ll charge anything that has a USB plug on one end. But cell phones suck it dry pretty quickly, so the Kindle’s mostly what I use it for. Has anyone else tried something like this?