The Eco Bloke

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Are you throwing away money?

Can you afford to take a crisp new £50 note each month and burn it? I thought not, but this is the amount that the average British family wastes each month on food that never gets eaten.

Think about the food cycle for one minute. Maybe that manky fruit that you chucked out last week. Usually grown in some exotic country where it is warm all year round. This fruit’s emissions are already high, even before it gets on the boat to leave to England. There is green house heating, watering, picking and packaging. All of which produces emissions of green house gasses.

Bottled water con?

I was watching an Open University video clip this morning on the web and it got me thinking about today’s blog post.

Bottled water – Why?

Bottled water costs more than petrol in the UK, but yet as a nation we consume 2,000,000,000 litres a year. Why?

In many cases people can not tell the difference in the taste of bottled water or tap water, but still the bottled water industry went from being worth £1bn in 2003 to £2bn in 2008. Why?

Most of the UK’s used plastic water bottles head to landfill or incineration, but still we by them. Why?

I don't need a bag!

According to our friends over at AbolishPlasticBags.org.uk plastic bag usage has fallen by 26% in just two years. No one can deny that this is a fantastic start, but it still means that a staggering 10 billion bags are still being made, used and then shipped off to landfill each and every year!

Today’s post is a challenge that I hope that you will not only take me up on, but will also share with friends, family and colleagues, so that we can continue to stop this wasteful practice together.

Freecycle instead of landfill

So, now that it is officially blooming freezing and we are just over a week away from Christmas I thought that I would write about FreeCycle.

The figures show that here in the UK we use as much as 83 square km of gift wrap making our presents look pretty under the tree. To put that into perspective, you could easily wrap the entire island of Guernsey with that.

With all that paper comes all those new presents. In many cases – toys, clothes and other stuff that replace things we had in the past. So as we enjoy our new things, our old stuff gets demoted to the bin.