Relocate Triangle - An Insider's Guide About Moving To The Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Area

Green Tip of the Week - 3-27-09

Clean up your dishwasher

Switch to a dishwashing powder that’s biodegradable and plant-based (try Ecover Ecological or Trader Joe’s powders). These cleansers cut through grime, but they do it without the bleach and phosphates that threaten river and marine life and leave chemical residue on your dishes.

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Green Tip of the Week - 3/20/09

Get Voicemail

If all answering machines in the US were replaced by voicemail, the annual energy savings would total nearly 2 billion Kilowatt-hours. The resulting reduction in air pollution would be equivalent to removing 250, 000 cars from the road a year.

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Green Tip of the Week - 3/13/09

Beat the Heat

It would take 2 trees 10 years to absorb the carbon dioxide you create from blow-drying 10 minutes a day for just one year. To lesson drying time, use a towel to soak up excess water, then air dry hair almost completely.

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Green Tip Of The Week - 3/6/09

If every North Carolinian spent a quarter on local food, it would equal $792 million for the states economy. That money circulates here in the state so it comes back to us.

From the Center for Environmental Farming Systems. For more information click here

More Good News in the Triangle

As we get over the last blast of winter around here – and no, it is not common for the Triangle to receive several inches of snow in March – we thought it might be a good time to point out a few recent successes in the area as well. With spring around the corner, the warm weather will be back, and we can bask in the glow of these recent triumphs.

Chapel Hill Among Top 10 College Sports Towns

In another of its seemingly endless surveys, Forbes magazine announced a few weeks ago that Chapel Hill finished seventh among all college sports towns in America. For its rankings, Forbes looked at the universities that finished in the top 50 in the Director’s Cup, a competition that ranks schools based on their performances in all sports. After reviewing quality-of-life measures, Forbes ranked Chapel Hill No. 7 based on the town’s “excellent schools,” relatively low crime rate and student-friendly night life available to those who attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

As for Raleigh and Durham, sorry, but Forbes did not include N.C. State or Duke respectively on the list. In fact, it made a slight swipe at Duke in its first sentence describing Chapel Hill: “Put it this way: You’ll see many more Duke students making the short drive down Tobacco Road to Chapel Hill from Durham than vice versa.” Ouch!

If you must know who finished first, it was Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan.

Raleigh Among Top Five Fastest Growing Cities

A survey released near the end of 2008 by American City Business Journals found that Raleigh finished second only to Las Vegas in its “growth score” from 2002 to 2007. Researchers used population growth, private-sector employment growth, per capita income growth, and gross metropolitan product growth to assign a “growth score” to each of the 100 largest U.S. metros.

Based on the criteria, Las Vegas finished with a “growth score” of 37.95 to Raleigh’s 31.07. Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla., Austin, Texas, and Phoenix rounded out the top five. Note that for the study, Raleigh was counted separately from Durham, which is not how many residents view the area’s growth, and therefore its “growth score” is probably a low one.