The government in 2022 banned the sale of bagged peat-based compost from 2024, which is a big step in the right direction and should save thousands of acres of peat bog in the country. Peat bog destruction causes huge amounts of CO2 emissions. When that law was passed, the government explained that the use of…
Tag: ecotips
Plant-based Milks and Dairy Milk
Milk from dairy cows has a higher carbon footprint by any measure than any plant-based milk on the market, including soya, oat, hazelnut, cashew, almond, rice, hemp, pea, potato or coconut. Replacing some or all of the cow milk in your diet and reducing your carbon footprint should be relatively easy from a taste perspective,…
Plastic Microfibres From Our Laundry Shouldn’t End Up In The Ocean
Polyester and other man-made fibres make great cheap clothes, but they slowly disintegrate, shedding plastic microfibres every time they are washed. In fact cotton does as well, but the cotton will break down in the environment, unlike microplastics. The microfibres end up in the oceans, where they appear as food to planktonic micro-organisms and enter…
Buying Sustainable Flowers
Mothers Day is on Sunday, March 19th this year, so there is time to think 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…
Simple Eco-Labelling – a Start for Sustainability
Keep an eye out for products using eco-labelling from Foundation Earth, using a simple green-to-red scale design and a grading from A+ to G. If it’s A+, it has scored highly in the audit with a low carbon footprint, low water usage, the resultant pollution too, and lastly having minimum impact on biodiversity (the buzzword…
How Chimneys Waste Heat
People who live in an apartment can safely skip this tip, but otherwise think of that fireplace and chimney. Unused, open chimneys waste heat, letting expensive warm air out and cold air in. King Charles has probably got chimney dampers on all his palace fireplaces, which can simply shut the chimney when the fireplace isn’t…
How to buy sustainably
These days it’s possible to buy stuff with shocking origins and impacts. We might not have time to be fussy about what we buy, or the money to afford the greenest option, but making an effort is the first step on the journey and nobody is expecting you to be perfect. We just have to put…
Support (1) a church going green and (2) pressure Islington Council on buildings
Two great easy eco actions you can take. ➡️ St Luke’s West Holloway is fundraising to get the last few thousand pounds needed to install solar panels on their church roof. Read more details about it here. You can donate via Stewardship as a guest without needing an account. Even a little donation will help…
How to cook pasta and save energy
The furore in Italy is a paygrade above the average Brit’s palette, but cooking pasta badly is easily done. Here is a method to cook pasta and save energy and keep it tasting good. The instructions are simple: Sources (get it???) below. Links and Resources to cook pasta and save energy
Green Christmas Trees
Apparently, most plastic Christmas trees end up in the garbage before their fifth year. This makes them a very poor substitute, ecologically-speaking, for real Christmas trees. It needs to be used for at least 12 years to break even with the average real Christmas tree, from a carbon footprint perspective (3.5kg per real tree). One…