Archive for the ‘Carbon footprints’ Category

It’s 5am and I’m walking to work (don’t ask). It’s a 15 minute walk. It’s still dark, and I notice that perhaps 40% of shops have lights on, including a local Iceland that has all it’s lights on.

And I’m thinking, if my local streets are representative of the whole country, then £millions worth of energy and CO2 is being wasted lighting shops when no one is there, and no one is shopping or even looking through the window

Christmas is fast approaching and I am looking back at 2009, at whether I can be more planet friendly, reduce my carbon footprint and be more sustainable in my living. This year I’ve been pretty good: shopping locally, cutting back on things like meat, walking more, and switching off as much as possible at home and at work.

The odd holiday splurge is the one thing that leaves a nasty

Last week, the Isles of Scilly held a world first community effort to save energy. Over a 24-hour period - on Energy Saving Day (E-Day) - the island’s residents switched off all non-essential electrical items in homes, schools and workplaces, and took live online measurements of the results. By the close of play at midnight, the islanders had achieved

In the run up to the crucial climate change conference in Copenhagen in December, the 10:10 campaign caught my eye.

The brainchild of Franny Armstrong, whose film…

Continuing on the green travel theme, if you travel for business to meet clients and suppliers, you could save money and cut carbon emissions by video conferencing instead….

Someone mentioned Energy Harvesting to me last night. The idea of converting the small amount of energy that’s generated from human motion into power for small gadgets and devices like phones. It’s on the way apparently.

For the past few months I’ve been thinking about coming out more strongly on climate change. Some of my colleagues say don’t. That it will scare people off. But I’m starting to feel that I can’t keep my mouth shut whilst the threat of global warming and climate change escalates. Earlier this month an ice bridge in Antartica linking a shelf of ice the size of Jamaica snapped, a pretty significant indicator of…

I don’t know about you but I always struggle with what to get my mum for Mother’s Day, (22nd March this year in case you’d forgotten). Most years she gets a hasty card and sometimes flowers, but I always wish I could come up with something more original, and not just send something for the sake of it.

I heard the term Guerilla Gardening for the first time this afternoon. There are even websites dedicated to it. Well I guess there would be. It sounds a bit more political than I had in mind: we’ve got this great new product in, it’s basically a tree in a grow bag that you start off indoors, before planting out when it’s reached sapling size…

There’s a lot of misinformation out there about environmental issues, and I think most people at some point probably find it hard to sort out the greenwash from the green. As long as it suits, I expect some companies will always…