Every self-respecting climate-friendly, sustainability website has its list of things to do, and this is ours! Being eco doesn’t need to be expensive, in fact there are lots of ways you can save money and be more climate-friendly. Here are the top changes you can make to live more sustainably.
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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…
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…
Stain Removal without the Chemicals
Sodium percarbonate (nappy bleach) or lemon juice in your wash will help keep your whites white. Not quite as eco-friendly or effective as drying your washing outside in the sun, but with British winters, what can one do? Yellow perspiration stains come out by soaking the item in white vinegar overnight. Vinegar mixed 50:50 with…
Three Little Birds on your Doorstep
Make sure to help the local bird population right now as winter makes their lives hard. Less daylight hours to forage, less forage to find, frozen water sources and higher metabolic energy demands all pile on the pressure for our garden songbirds. So clean and fill up those bird feeders. You don’t need a garden,…
Vampire Energy
Vampire energy accounts for over a 100 billion kilowatt hours per year in the USA, and in Britain amounts to around 12% of domestic bills. Also known as standby power or phantom load, it is slowly being tackled at home by people who have to pay their own bills, but it is still horrendous in…
Circularity
One of the hot topics in sustainability this year has been circularity. It’s descriptive of how resources can be best utilised over and over in society and the economy. With over 8 billion people on this Earth, we can’t afford to waste stuff anymore. The old linear economy going from production to landfill is as…