If you’re a parent, perhaps; if you’re a kid, no: it’s almost Back to School time (actually, it has already arrived if you are in Florida)—and your blogger is currently in grad school so has some skin in this particular game. As a result, there will be no small amount of back to school shopping taking place, if it hasn’t already. Inhabitat has a handy guide to “eco-friendly back to school essentials,” including PVC-free binders, a solar backpack (for recharging smartphones and other gizmos), pencils made from recycled newspapers, the paradoxically named “Staple-Free Stapler,” and the unappetizingly named “Recycled Lunch Set” (it’s not the lunch that is recycled—thankfully—but refers to something that sounds suspiciously like a lunchbox). My new semester starts next week; time to see if I can locate my old Star Wars lunchbox from 1978. It’s a distance learning program, but every now and then I shake myself down for my lunch money... Speaking of back to school, the Sierra Club has released its latest list of the “greenest” colleges in the U.S., with University of California, Davis, coming out on top. (Alas, my alma mater Syracuse only came in at #75, although I think that’s higher than our football ranking; my current grad school, SUNY Buffalo, was buffaloed and didn’t even make the list.)