small ritual

buy one get one tree

innocent drinks are running a tree-planting promotion on their large cartons - each carton has a unique code, go to their website and enter the code, and a tree is planted in a carbon-offsetting scheme by carbon clear. farmers are paid for tree survival and growth over ten years, rather than just seedlings planted, to give incentives for long-term benefits.

i'm suspicious of carbon-offsetting projects [lowering consumption is the only sure way] but this one came free with the drink, so why not.

who pays for cheap clothes?

who pays for cheap clothes? five questions the low-cost retailers must answer

Something new is sweeping through the high street. Whereas five years ago, style-conscious teenagers would never be seen, like, dead in a bargain clothes shop, today the Saturday afternoon high street is awash with Primark bags and their proud owners boasting the bargains they have found.          

The four companies this report focusses on, Asda, Tesco, Primark and Matalan, are to fashion what McDonalds and Burger King are to food: mass produced, hassle-free, fast, popular, and reliant on exploitation down the supply chain to keep things that way.  It asks what impact this trend is having on workers' rights, and challenges these retailers to ensure that workers are not paying for our cheap clothes with their human rights.

depressing but enlightening reading. discovered while searching for ethical sportswear - that's actual technical sports clothing for running and working out, not leisure/casual wear. funny how companies like nike triggered the whole ethical clothing movement with their working practices, and yet years later they still have the actual sports clothing market sewn up.

earlier today i was in the adidas store and niketown in oxford street. such beautiful stores, stylish clothes, images and sounds of empowerment and achievement. and hidden inside each garment, a little label saying 'made in vietnam' 'made in cambodia'. temples of forgetfulness, of consumer denial, trying to drown out the real story of each garment with recorded cheering. it's as good as a work of art.

low energy lighting again

lighting report makes the  front page of the independent  with a backup article from greenpeace

This report illustrates yet again what we all know but somehow fail to address: it is often not the demand for energy, but waste of energy that is driving us towards radical climate change.

plus these stats:

ENERGY-SAVING BULBS (compact fluorescent lights - CFLs)

* An 11-Watt CFL bulb (equivalent to an ordinary 60W bulb) costs £2.41 to run per year.

* Energy-saving bulbs last on average 12 times longer than ordinary light bulbs, with a life span of around six years.

* They cost about £3.50.

* Each bulb can reduce your electricity bill by up to £10 a year.

* They generate up to 70 per cent less heat.

ORDINARY (incandescent) LIGHT BULBS

* An ordinary 60W bulb costs up to £13.14 in electricity bills per year.

* The average life span is between 750 and 1000 hours, which gives round five months of use.

* An ordinary bulb costs around 50p.

* In most houses lighting accounts for approximately 15 per cent of the electricity bill.

* If every American home switched their five most-used light fittings to energy-saving bulbs, they would save $6bn (£3.2bn) and reduce greenhouse gases by nearly half a million tons.

* 90 per cent of the energy goes into generating heat.

Emily Dugan

ealing food hero

tom beaston the owner of slowfood-endorsed farm w5 is a food hero in this month's ecologist magazine!

lighting the key to energy saving

A global switch to efficient lighting systems would trim the world's electricity bill by nearly one-tenth.

That is the conclusion of a study from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which it says is the first global survey of lighting uses and costs.

The carbon dioxide emissions saved by such a switch would, it concludes, dwarf cuts so far achieved by adopting wind and solar power.

as already mentioned here and here

natural fibres better for everest

replica clothes pass everest test

climbers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine died while attempting to scale everest in 1924. it has long been assumed that their 'amateurish' clothing was at least partly to blame. but the discovery of mallory's body on everest in 1999 enabled researchers to create replica clothes. over the last few weeks these have been tested by climbers on mount everest - and have turned out to be superior to modern synthetic-based garments!

the ultimate intention of the research is to find out if mallory and irvine actually reached the summit in 1924, long before the first 'official' conquest by norgay and hillary in 1953. if it turns out that they died on the way down, history will have been rewritten as a result of fabric technology.

the superiority of natural fabrics for extreme conditions is a pet subject of howies, so i tipped them off and they blogged it. i find the whole thing fascinating - it seems we have to relearn what our ancestors knew [but didn't know that they knew]. like proper bread instead of wonderloaf.

water powered gadgets

do exist after all - see here [scroll down past the wind-up radios and torches]

i'd love to know how this works

from tango group who market the freeplay wind-up radios and torches

mind you, i'm not sure how much of an advance water-powered calculators are - there have been solar-powered ones for years. and my 1980 casio scientific is still going on the original battery - and it's not for lack of use, it's been my only calculator through 26 years as a student and architect.

i-junk and cd recycling

the i-junk generation post on cd recycling in jamble magazine via howies

also this post on alternative power for gadgets such as solio

world naked bike ride

naked cycling protest this afternoon in london, brought to you by world naked bike ride as a protest against oil dependency and the dominance of cars on roads. the nakedness higlights the vulnerability of the human body in traffic, but of course it also makes headlines. apparently last year's ride was the UK's biggest ever naked protest at 250 people. fortunately the weather's great today at 25C sun.

here's some rather amusing photos of last year's london ride

solio

just added solio to the green list. photovoltaic charger for small devices like phones, ipods. great for the states or australia, but i'm not sure how effective it is in cloudy england. what we need is a device that creates power when wet.