Beat the Credit Crunch

Are you trying to cut food bills? These credit crunch tips will help you cut down on food waste as well as helping you to save money.

• Plan meals before you shop and only buy what you need, not forgetting to plan for when you might use leftovers, eat out or with friends.
  
• Take shopping bags with you. Some supermarkets are starting to charge for bags, others give you loyalty card points for re-using your own bags.
  
• Don't forget to take bags you can use for fruit and vegetables. Loose fruit and vegetables are often cheaper and you can buy the quantity you really need.
  
• Use up leftovers.
  
• Put out peelings, apple cores, bread crumbs, bacon rind, and fat for the birds.
  
• Make your own compost from kitchen and garden waste.
  
• Grow your own herbs.
  
• Go shopping with a friend and share those buy one get one free offers.
  

Fairtrade Fortnight 2009

 

The Fairtrade Foundation has announced Fairtrade Fortnight 2009, launched on London's South Bank on 22 February.

The theme this year is "Make it Happen – Choose Fairtrade".

 

Ethical Superstore have put together an A-Z of all things Fairtrade: See it here.

 

Lucy Siegle asks whether buying fair trade is a waste of money. It is always tempting to ask what difference do my actions actually make in the grand scheme of things? Last week Nicky Campbell was asking if we are all too grumpy to be green.

It is a worry that people are going to use the 'credit crunch' as an excuse to give up on any attempt to be green. I have already heard many people talk about recycling being stockpiled because prices have dropped. Some are talking about that being reason in itself to just bin their rubbish rather than recycling. I disagree.

Fair-trade products are often more expensive than other products, but I plan to keep buying. In my view there shouldn't be unfair trade, but there is. Maybe, my actions make very little difference in the global scheme of things, but I plan to keep trying.

 

 

Eco Valentines

The Energy Saving Trust have some great ideas for going green this Valentine's Day. And once again, these ideas show that going green is often a way to beat the Credit Crunch.

Water

Water is something that in many parts of the world is seen as the most precious commodity. Yet in the UK, often we take it for granted. Be honest, how many times have you poured away water that you've taken out with you on a trip or taken up to bed with you and not drunk?

A while ago it occurred to me that I could be using this water rather than pouring it down the sink.

I found an old plastic watering can – the kind that was used for watering houseplants – and I keep this on the windowsill by the sink. So now when I take bottles of water out school bags and sports bags or glasses of water from around the house I tip the water into the watering can rather than down the sink.

I use this water to rinse the sink and to rinse out glass bottles and other packaging for the recycling. Best of all, when the watering can is full I use this as my cue to water my houseplants. They are looking a lot healthier since I introduced this new system, which probably goes to show just how much water we used to waste.

A Hole New Font

A friend sent me this link today. http://www.ecofont.eu/ecofont_en.html

This got me thinking about printing in general.

I try to print as little as possible – to save paper and ink, but I hadn't really thought about my printer settings. I often print things for proof reading in best quality, whereas I could use draft.

 

Testing out the ecofont!

 

New Year’s Resolution

This time last year we decided to get rid of our rubbish bin. It was feeling a little sad and underused already so we gave it flash label "Plastic Recycling" and bought it a friend "Metal Recycling". In addition to this we had a basket for burnable rubbish, a compost bin, various containers to collect bits to put out for the birds, and the bottles collect in a cupboard until someone can be bothered to carry them out to the kerbside collection bin.

Okay, we do get some funny looks when someone asks "where's your bin?" but we are all getting used to saying that we don't have one.

Feeling smug that we had no rubbish, I felt tempted to ask for an extra recycling bin. However, I realised that was probably not the answer. Just as rubbish has a cost, so does recycling, and the thing that is going to drive manufacturers to reduce packaging is consumer demand. So, as a consumer, I decided that I was going to demand less packaging. Most shop assistants no longer give me strange looks when I insist on using my own bag, or plonk my fruit and veg bagless at the till (though I draw the line at sprouts!). I have managed to cut down the amount of packaging I produce for recycling.

However, the sin I plan to attack in 2009 is the food waste.

I have a compost, a wormery and I feed the birds with my food waste, which is better than it going in the bin. I already plan for leftovers to be used as much as I can but I think there is still room for improvement. So among my New Year's Resolutions this year is to focus on food waste.

Want to join me? Have a look at Love Food Hate Waste for some ideas.

How do you charge your mobile phone?

Ofcom report some interesting findings in their UK Communications Market Review 2008.

The report tells us that :

"Although nearly three-quarters of consumers (72%) say that they care about the environment and take it into account in their personal lives, only 39% say that they compare environmentally-friendly aspects when purchasing communications devices."

The report suggest this may be because less than a third of consumers think it is easy to compare energy use of different devices. Ofcom say that Energy Saving Labels are an important way of trying to improve customer knowledge about efficiency, but 50% of consumers say they are not aware of energy labels.

The report says that " only 30% are aware of the obligation for retailers to take back and recycle old equipment free of charge when purchasing a new device under the Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment Directive, and only 7% appear to have taken advantage of this."

Source: Ofcom (2008), UK Communications Market Review 2008: Interactive Key Points available at: http://comment.ofcom.org.uk/cmr08/

Their findings also show that many consumers use unnecessary power by charging their mobile phones up overnight, not switching off broadband wireless routers when they are not in use, and not switching off Television set-top boxes.

I try to charge my mobile phone in the car using energy produced as a by-product. My children tell me they no longer charge up their phones overnight since they realised how much energy this wastes. However, my first New Year's Resolution for 2009 must be to turn off my router. Next on my hit list will be the Sky Box. Problem is I don't understand how it works – how many of us say that though, and it is no excuse. So 2009 will be the year in which I find out exactly when the Sky Box needs to be on and when it doesn't. It is not going to rule my life anymore – I will pull that plug.

Have a look at this:

Ofcom UK CMR 2008 Charts

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