As you stock up on shiny new gifts and gadgets over Christmas, you’re bound to generate a fair amount of waste that your council won’t pick up and recycle. Recycle-more.co.uk has come up with a text-based scheme to ensure you don’t end up contributing to a landfill.
Simply taste ‘waste’ or ‘elec’ and your postcode to 60060 from anywhere in the UK. You’ll get a text back with details of the place closest to you that will provide the facilities you need. Not everyone is lucky enough to live in a council that recycles plastic bottles, for example (thank you Ealing!), but that needn’t be a problem anymore. And, as New Consumer points out, if you’re visiting around the country and want to take your good habits with you, it’s easily done. Texts cost 50p plus standard network charges, but you won’t be charged extra for replies that take more than one text. Any profit will be ploughed back into recycling schemes and campaigns.
Christmas seems a good time to remind people to use charity search engines. But remembering to always visit the same page just doesn't happen and frequently people are put off by the idea of changing settings on their browser. Fear not! Shiny Shiny is here to make it really, really easy and take away any excuses for failing in your good intentions.
Some sites, like LetThemKnowItsChristmas.com and ClickNow.org offer quick links to help you set them as a homepage, but many let you add them directly to your browser's search bar. Below are some quick tips for adding charity search engines to your search bar, and adjusting the settings so that you use them automatically, all year round.
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Ever wondered if those mountains of recycling really make you that much of a saint compared with that mysterious thing called the norm? If so, you should try a new online carbon calculator which compares your greenness with the national average in more than 50 countries, so you can feel as guilty (or smug!) as you deserve when your habits are compared with those of your neighbours.
Set up by Standard Chartered and developed by the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management (ECCM), the Greatest Race on Earth site hosts the first calculator of its kind, and is just as useful for people in the UK as it is for those in India, Kenya, China, Taiwan and the UAE as well as many other African, Asian and Middle Eastern cities. It's a nicely designed site too, so why not go and give it a whirl?
Charitable donations don't get any easier than this. We all use search engines several times a day, so why not get into the giving spirit and set Let Them Know It's Christmas as your homepage. It's basically a google search within a site that's donating all its advertising revenue to World Vision projects to help end poverty.
'Advertising?', I hear you cry. Well yes, but there are no annoying flash banners or pop-ups here. The site uses google ads relevant to your search. An interesting feature as a running total on donations here, along with what it amounts to in real terms. At the moment, this is £72, 2 goats, and educational support for 5 children. I think they could be doing a lot better than that, so please do bookmark it, and use it for your searches. I promise it works just as well as plain old google...
A year ago, I volunteered at two of the centres run by Crisis that feed, clothe and provide shelter for homeless people over Christmas. It was an incredibly rewarding experience, and the charity do a fantastic job of giving hope to some of society's most vulnerable people at a time when the rest of us are having fun. I would definitely recommend it, so if you're interested in giving it a go, you can find out how, here.
This year, I've failed to get my act together on the volunteering front due to other commitments, and know that many others are in the same situation of wanting to help, but not having the time to go down to the centres themselves. So I was pleased to find out about a scheme run by Workplace Giving that allows you to donate to Crisis (and many other charities) as you earn.
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In today's Guardian, Lucy Aitken talks about the ethical shopper's worst nightmare: Greenwash. We're all aware that the claims to greenness made by many companies are at best, exaggerated, but how clued up are we really about being tricked into buying eco-friendly products that are anything but?
Firstly, if you've been taken in, don't panic. Marketing bods do everything in their power to make us believe the stuff they sell us is greener than freshly-cut grass, so you shouldn't be ashamed to admit it when you buy the latest bit of 'green gear' only to twig later that it came in yards of plastic packaging, or was transported halfway across the world to get into your eager hands. There is even an award for the worst examples of greenwash, whose 'winners' will be announced later this month.
So, if it's happened to you and you'd like to prevent future mishaps, we've prepared a brief guide to detecting greenwash before it hits you in the pocket. Follow the jump for the rest of the tips.
1. Watch out for over-use of jargon.
By and large, companies that make the most noise about helping the environment are the ones that are actually doing the least, and those that do make a difference will be honest about what they are doing and - crucially - what they're not. Two companies being very honest about their efforts at the moment are Eurostar and BSkyB.
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If you've ever wavered over buying something - felt sure you've heard there's some sort of dirt on the company but you can't think what it is, this list from Ethical Consumer of UK companies to boycott will be your best friend.
It tells you all you need to know about organisations that have been flagged as 'inethical' in some way recently, and is entirely up-to-date as readers can add to it whenever they hear that a company is up to no good. There's no preaching here - just the facts you need to make an informed decision on what products to go for if you want to make the world a better place.
Examples of current boycotts are Kleenex, for refusing to use recycled paper; Kurt Geiger for using rabbit fur in some of its boots and shoes;
and Proctor & Gamble, for almost every conceivable sin under the sun. Read the list for yourself, and make up your mind which products you'd want to avoid in future!
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