It’s been a year since the last eco tip about chocolate, and since then, the price of chocolate in the UK has gone up 50% because of the increased occurrence of droughts, extreme heat, extreme rainfall and disease outbreaks, due to global warming in cocoa-growing countries. Both Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire are projected to be…
Author: Adam Hardy
Zoologist at heart. Environmentalist by necessity. Stage hand, financial trader, secretary, card payments designer, software developer, fossil fuel big data warehouse consultant. Amateur psychologist. Now climate change salvage engineer.
Repair First
A new scheme has started in North London where residents can claim 50% off the repair costs of electrical and electronic goods from participating repair shops. In a circular economy, nothing would be thrown away. It would be fixed or recycled. If every household in the UK repaired two extra items per year, estimates show…
Local Wildlife and Nature
We benefit from nature and wildlife in the city in multiple ways: mental health, air quality, temperature amelioration, storm water run-off, community enhancement, education, recreation, tourism…. However sometimes we really mess it up. During the COVID pandemic and lockdowns, London wildlife was hammered and wood mice and other rodents, shrews, weasels, hedgehogs, kingfishers, little owls…
Alcohol in Bottles
Until a national bottle deposit return scheme is created to enable re-use of glass bottles, they will remain the most energy-intensive packaging and transport option for alcohol. Large amounts of energy are needed, and it generally comes from fossil fuels. Both hops farms (pictured) and vineyards in many countries are threatened by local changes in…
Recycling
While we won’t recycle our way out of the climate crisis, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. If something isn’t recycled, then in order of increasing rubbishness, it will get incinerated, end up in a landfill site, or escape into the wild and especially with plastic, end up floating in the ocean. Here are a couple…
Editor and Sustainability Writer Volunteer Required
Do you know or enjoy finding out about everything to do with sustainability and want to try your hand at writing some eco tips for our newsletter and website? Tasks: Goals: creating a WordPress post by close-of-play Friday for publication on the Monday Location: in our six boroughs (Camden, Islington, Hackney, Haringey, Westminster and the…
AI
AI servers are trained on huge amounts of public data and run on the cloud with 24/7 availability, requiring immense amounts of energy and water to run and keep cool. With the current national energy systems around the world, it’s forecast that this will require massive amounts of fossil fuels and water. Governments are mostly…
Waste No More
In the UK we waste about £250 of food per person a year, or 10 million tonnes in total, according to the sustainability research group WRAP. That includes waste by us at home, by shops, restaurants and cafés and farms. Here’s one way we can help shops and restaurants combat the problem and save money…
Buying Sustainable Flowers
The key to buying sustainable flowers is to have time to plan and avoid being trapped into getting the most unsustainable flowers at the last minute from the supermarket. There are three major sustainability problems with growing flowers: To a certain extent, the first two are mutually exclusive – the reason for growing flowers in…
Someone Talking Rubbish? Do A By-pass
People talking rubbish about the climate, the environment, nature, or sustainability often makes us want to contradict them, but that is most often futile, and there is a better way to approach it. If someone tells you that offshore wind turbines kill whales, tell them that wind energy adds billions to the world economy. That’s…