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At a time when green buzz-words such as ‘food miles’, ’shop local’ and ’slow fashion’ are being bandied about by just about everyone with any kind of environmental conscience, doing your shopping online may seem to be the antithesis of all the good work being done, but look a little more closely, and you might just find that the internet is a greener option than the shopping mall.

Shop from home and let us do the hard work!

If you are anything like me, the simple thought of walking down the high street at this time of year will be enough to bring on a severe attack of the nerves. This is where the internet really comes into its own. With thousands of stress free retail outlets just a click away, the days of spending hours trawling round town in the freezing cold hunting for that perfect gift for a special someone is long gone, and it couldn’t have happened sooner. It turns out that my fear of Christmas shopping is good for the environment as well. Bonus!

Read the rest of Shop online to save the planet… »

Lawrence and his beets

When approached by a team of professors heralding the benefits of his beetroot juice, Lawrence Mallinson from James White Drinks was skeptical. However, his drink could be just what is needed to offer a natural alternative to lower blood pressures…

Read the rest of Beetroot Juice and Blood Pressure »

Ethical Superstore presents this exclusive book extract of the new, and hilarious true tale of one man’s journey from self-confessed planet-killing lad to eco-friendly, green-crusader There’s A Hippo In My Cistern. Caught between his conflicting London life of lads and lager and his developing relationship with a radical eco-babe, Pete May tells here of parties at George Monbiot’s in the embryonic days of the Oxford Green movement, as part of his slow conversion from bad football-crazy lad to good greenie a decade later.

In my new Oxford circles the guru of the Greens is George Monbiot. Everyone speaks about him in awed tones and refers to him as simply ‘George’. He’s a Fellow (is that the academic version of being a lad?) at the university and writes columns for the Guardian.

George is the most intellectual man I’ve ever met. His parents are rumoured to be keen Conservatives, but then so are mine. George is a radical with a great grasp of figures and an incisive mind, dedicated to fighting planetary pollution.

He isn’t exactly a football fan though. He says he went to an England game at Wembley once and it epitomised everything he disliked about xenophobia and nationalism. At one of the regular Green picnics we discuss TV. George says there’s so much he can do without watching TV. He could write a column every day there are so many issues to research. He claims that TV is like a boxed fire in the living room. Humans used to tell stories around the campfire but now that oral tradition has been lost.

Read the rest of Last minute summer eco reads »

Green news we loved: In case you missed it first time around, here’s our August round-up of the most talked about, most innovative solutions or simply the most awesome green news to hit the headlines.

One-third of China’s emissions come from exports
Often dubbed the country to overtake the US in carbon emissions, a new study revealed this month that China’s growing export market is responsible for one-third of their emissions – much of it from manufacturing ‘advanced’ electronics goods for developed countries. With International policy at the moment tending to penalise the country that produces rather than the one that consumes the goods ¬- such as US and Europe – we must ask, is it time for a policy change?

Ikea want cheap green tech
Ikea stated they are to invest in green technology in order to apply their familiar low-cost furniture approach to domestic power generation. They are said to be plummeting nearly £40 billion into technologies such as solar, water conservation, efficiency meters and alternative lighting, and are hoping to get products into stores in two to four years time. Will this be affordable green tech for the global masses? Let’s see. Keep an Allen key at the ready.

Read the rest of Green News Roundup August 2008 »

Ethical Superstore spoke with Garden Organic – the leading authority on organic gardening – to find out just what’s involved in owning your own wormery. If this is something you’ve considered, but not sure whether you want a colony of worms in your life, this expert advice on the fascinating composting critters could jumpstart your love for them.

Ethical Superstore: I’m thinking of getting a wormery - will worms recycle all my waste?
Garden Organic: Having your own wormery is perfect for composting kitchen waste, thereby reducing methane from landfill and simultaneously providing you with a rich compost - but don’t expect it to handle vast quantities of garden waste.

ES: How do the worms do it?
GO: Basically, they eat your organic waste, breaking it down in their stomach and produce worm casts – a very nutrient-rich compost. But you need a special species of worm, not any old garden worm can do this.

ES: How much kitchen waste can they eat?
GO: They can eat an incredible half a kilo of waste every 3 to 4 days in the summer.

Read the rest of Worms, eat my waste! »

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German firm DVD-D have launched ‘Einmal’, a disposable DVD format which is designed to facilitate DVD ‘rental’ from coffee shops, service stations and other such locations where movie rental was not previously possible. Retailing at around €3.99 ($6.44 /£3.20), the key feature of these discs is the fact that they are rendered unplayable 48 hours after opening, giving the customer all of the benefits of movie rental, without any of the annoyances such as returning the discs or incurring late fees.

The discs are standard DVDs with a self-destruct chemical coating applied, which reacts with the air once the disc is removed from its vacuum packaging. Once your allotted 48 hours have passed, you will be greeted with a ‘No Disc’ error on your dvd player, leaving you with two options - throw away the DVD, or gain a shiny new coaster for your coffee mug.

What seems to have been overlooked is the environmental impact of such discs. By their very nature these are discs which are designed to be thrown away at the end of their very short lifetime, undoubtedly adding to the landfill problem. The discs are designed to be recycled, but the number that are will no doubt make up a very small proportion of the total number of discs produced. The majority are clearly destined for landfill, and this is a problem. Added to that must be the cost, environmentally, of the production of these discs, and the environmental impact of the processes involved in recycling them. Even with a 100% recycle rate, we still see an environmental negative, as recycling is an energy intensive process which by its very nature creates pollutants.

This latest symbol of our over-determination to make everything disposable is a worrying one, and one which should be noted with caution. Here at How Ethical we can’t help but wonder, will they release ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in this format?

No, actually, they’re not. Sevin Coskun’s entry to Treehugger’s Greener Gadgets Design Competition is remarkable in both it’s simplicity, fuctionality and message, but you have to wonder what would motivate someone to install a washing machine in their bathroom… or a toilet in their kitchen.

The Washup combines a washing machine with a toilet, with the grey water from the machine repurposed for flushing the loo. As the average toilet uses 8 litres of water per flush, and most people use the toilet an average of 35 times per week (according to USwitch), the water savings potential is huge.

Here at How Ethical! we can’t help but think it’s all a little impractical, and can’t see many people going out of their way to have this fitted, but the promotion of grey water reuse is commendable, and with a few design tweaks (like plumbing the components into different rooms!) this could be a winner! [via Treehugger]

I had the pleasure of spending the past weekend at the Latitude Festival, on the beautiful Henham Park Estate, in Southwold, Suffolk. It was a superb festival, to say the least, and the sun shone all weekend, so the wellies stayed firmly in the rucksack, which was nice after the muddy mess that was Glastonbury.

What really made me smile this weekend was that the festival has made a huge effort to reduce its impact on the environment by introducing a number of new measures, some of which are just genius. The biggest change was in the way the bars worked. Obviously festival goers are a thirsty bunch, and go through a fair few pints of beer / cider / lager / whatever. One of the biggest problems with this is that it is normally served in single-use plastic glasses which end up strewn around the site making a mess and causing problems for the litter-pickers. By introducing a re-usable, more durable plastic glass, for which they asked a £2 deposit, the organisers ensured that the beautiful parkland was not blighted by this most common of problems, and that less plastic ended up in landfill. Why it hasn’t been done before, I don’t know.

The other big change was the introduction of a three bin system for waste. Festival-goers were asked to split there waste into ‘Recyclable’, ‘Compostable, and ‘Neither’, a system which was well adhered to, and by the end of the weekend the ‘Neither’ bins were by far the most empty. Another scheme to bring back next year then.

Transport was also looked at, and recognising the fact that public transport is one of the most environmentally friendly ways to get to the festival, a day-ticket holder campsite was introduced, which allowed those who weren’t camping all weekend to camp for one night, and use public transport to get home the next day, as evening buses around Southwold aren’t all that regular.

All in all, Latitude seems very keen to promote green issues, and the steps taken this year will no doubt be adopted by other Mean Fiddler festivals in the future, and I look forward to them being the norm, rather than the exception.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vS9ub_9WUs[/youtube]

Found this neat little video all about fair trade while doing some work on a section of EthicalSuperstore.com

People Tree is a fair trade and ecological fashion company, selling clothing and accessories.

They’re really into organic cotton farming, and they make the dinosaur suit and the cuddly bunny (not Frank) that I featured in the green babies post the other week.

Anyway, the video is really cool, so watch it. It’s by a guy called Chris Haughton who made it into Time magazine’s Style & Design 100 for being one of “today’s most influential designs”.

It’s really great to see this guy listed alongside people like Jonathan Ive (Apple iPod and iPhone), James Dyson (the Dyson vacuum cleaner) and Paul Smith (all manner of cool stuff).