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Google employees are being given free bicycles to help reduce the environmental impact of their travel to work. The company has also installed solar panels at its HQ to provide green energy.
Although I'll ask, I think it's unlikely my employer will give me a bike. The story has made me think though: a lot of people spend more time at the office than at home, so what can companies do to lessen their environmental impact?
Ecover has recently teamed up with the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition to give you the chance to win a green spring clean for your home, a copy of Ecover's Healthy Homes book, and a copy of the coalition's I count book - all you'll need to ensure your home gets green-clean and stays that way! Instructions on how to enter will be on Ecover's products in coming weeks. Ecover is also interested in your views on being green, and your attitudes towards green living. Why not complete the survey here, and give them some ideas on the sort of green products you would like to see on the shelves?
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It seems our parents' attempts to make us 'think of the starving children' when we left food on our plates were all in vain: Britons, we learnt today, throw away a third of our food, equating to 6.7 million tonnes every year.
I know I'm as guilty as the next Brit, especially since I often cook for myself but still buy family packs of bread, vegetables and other perishable items out of sheer laziness. So I've come up with a few tips on how to reduce your food waste. Please feel free to suggest more!
1. Pay attention to use-by dates on the food you buy. It's not unusual for supermarkets to put new stock next to stuff that's almost past its sell-by. Taking a few seconds to check this means you'll throw out a lot less. You might also want to invest in some re-sealable containers for keeping food fresh for longer.
2. Get a wormery, and turn your rubbish into high quality compost. Worms won't eat all your food waste (citrus and onions are a no-no) but once you've cut down the amount you buy, you can start feeding your wriggly friends vegetable peelings, old fruit, leftover pasta, rice and even small amounts of meat, and they'll soon be happily churning out plant feed. Wormcity sell them from just £20.
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I've bought several reusable plastic bags over the last year and, some how, I've never got round to actually reusing them. Instead they've been folded neatly and left in the kitchen. Utterly useless. However, at the beginning of last week as I popped into Asda's for my daily 'I've forgotten something from the weekly shop' catch up, I remembered to pick one up. The day before, you see, I'd used two plastic bags and promptly thrown them in the bin afterwards. I realised if I did that five times a week on random items then I could use up to 10 bags per week. And if I used that volume every week, it was entirely likely I could use 520 plastic bags per year.
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Debate continues to rage over the government's plans to go ahead with a new generation of Trident missiles, with the news today that Nigel Griffiths, deputy leader of the Commons, has quit the government ahead of Wednesday's vote on the renewal plan.
If you'd like to add your voice to the growing number concerned about the Trident replacement issue, which is detailed on the CND site, there are already a lot of petitions and protests to get involved with, many of them accessible from your desk. Designer Katherine Hamnett of choose life fame is leading a letter writing campaign at her website, which provides all the info you'll need to lobby your MP, but you've only got one more day to do it. If you want to be closer to the action, however, CND will be holding an emergency lobby of parliament on the day of the vote.
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Doing my weekly 'big shop' this weekend, I think I counted two other people reusing carrier bags. And despite the racks of bags-for-life and notices on every aisle promising brownie points for bringing your own bag, I still had to fight the shop assistants' attempts to put my groceries in a plastic bag at the checkout.
So I was heartened to see that someone's started this online campaign to get more people into the habit of having a shopper-bag on them at all times. Carry on Carriers set weekly 'challenges' to readers, and have produced this lovely little video which I think should be a compulsory part of checkout training...
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There are 9 million children on this planet who are refugees. Of the 6 billion people alive on Earth today, 2.1 billion of them are children. If you can't do the maths, by our calculations that means that 0.4% of the world's children - or nearly one in every 200 - are refugees.
In an attempt to do our part to help combat this problem, Hippyshopper is taking part in Click4theCause, a collaboration between the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and Microsoft.
For every web search made using Click4theCause, Microsoft will donate money to the ninemillion.org campaign, which provides refugee children with education and sports programmes.
