I’ve just been on the Peterborough breakfast show (how exciting) to give some hints and tips on how to have a greener Christmas.
Whilst Paul Stainton’s idea of putting Kermit on top of the tree is fabulous there are some genuine things we can all do to try to be a little bit kinder to the environment, and, quite frankly, if we want to save Lapland for our children from the effects of climate change we all need to be thinking about how we can change our behaviour!
Some of the things I'm doing are:
Making my own presents, biscuits, candles and lip balm all round
Looking out for bargains in charity shops, on ebay and at boot sales
Not over doing the food shopping, this of course saves money as well as cuts down on waste
Buying local where I can, pressies from the handmade pop up shop in Westgate arcade and from the Green Backyards craft fair
Making my own present labels from last year’s cards
Recycling wrapping paper
Things we can all do include:
1. Millions of Christmas cards are sent to landfill every year so why buy new cards when you can get creative and make some out of ones you’ve been sent in previous years.
2. Try making your own Christmas decorations out of paper, that way when they’re finished with, you can recycle them or keep them for following years. Check out Laura’s class on Greeniversity if you want to get involved in making some colourful designs.
3. If you get any unwanted clothes this Christmas like that horrible jumper from your Nan or a dodgy tie why not donate them to a charity shop. What you might not like someone else may love!
4. If you’re putting up Christmas lights this year try getting solar powered fairy lights to reduce your carbon footprint and if not try to reduce the amount of time they’re left on each day.
5. Look out for recycled wrapping paper and use string or ribbon to tie up your presents rather than using sticky tape.
6. Visit www.lovefoodhatewaste.com to find out what you can do with your Christmas dinner leftovers!
7. Re-use your shopping bags during your Christmas shopping spree, if you buy a bag for life you can reduce the amount CO2 and methane going into the atmosphere.
8. Turn the heating down and put on an extra jumper if you’re cold this winter.
9. You get a lot of batteries during Christmas from electrical gifts so make sure you recycle them when they fail on you. Any shop that sells batteries are legally obliged to have a recycling bin for them, so make sure you hand them in.
10. Try to get local food for your Christmas dinner from your local market, this reduces car usage as you won’t need to drive far for it and helps your local economy.
11. Instead of sending Christmas cards this year and adding to the amount that ends up in landfill you can always send E-cards, many websites offer free E-cards with loads of different designs for your friends and family.
12. Secret Santa. By doing a secret Santa in your workplace it reduces the amount of money you will spend than if you bought everyone gifts!
Credit due to Selina for the list above, I pinched it from her blog last year, but it’s still great advice so as they so if it’s not broke don’t fix it and in this case, for the sake of Santa’s homeland follow it!!!
Two films focusing on the human impact of climate change are being screened at New Hope Ministry tomorrow at midday.
As part of the Green Festival Event, New Hope UK Charity in partnership with Peterborough Environment City Trust will be screening two short films about the environment titled Sisters on the Planet and beyond the Tipping point. This will be taking place on the 8th June, 2011 between 12.00 noon and 15.00pm at New Hope on Rock Road off Lincoln Road.
Admission is free, but donations are welcomed to support the ministry's work, which provides much-needed help for homeless and vulnerable people both here in the UK and those in developing countries. After the films there will be a chance to have some refreshments and discuss the issues raised by the films in a friendly informal networking session.
It’s May 1998 and I am eleven years old. Ronaldo (the fat one, not the greasy one) is set to be the star of World Cup 1998, before eventually succumbing to host nation France in the final. But it is the legendary yellow jersey of Brazil that has caught my eye, but where am I to find the exorbitant £49.99 to buy one – plus the extra cost of getting ‘Samaldo’ emblazoned on the back? I’d still be saving if I’d relied on pocket money. The only choice then is to root through the cupboards and flog my expensively purchased, now unwanted wares out of mums’ car boot at 6am in a Church car park in Radcliffe. But it was worth it, and I wore that shirt every day in the summer of 1998. As the first thing I ever saved up to buy, it’s a treasured possession, and one I can’t imagine ever parting with.
I went to dozens of car boot sales after this; sold things in ‘Loot’ magazine and, when my offered items became fewer and more valuable, I started using eBay – the online car boot sale. Just because the things I sold were no longer of use to me, didn’t mean they had ceased to be of any value. Similarly, I’ve just paid £0.01 for a guidebook of Venice from the ‘used’ section on Amazon.com. Presumably someone paid £14.99 for the book before heading to Venice. They subsequently went to Venice (or simulated the experience by reading the guidebook cover to cover whilst sat in a canoe with a Cornetto). After this experience, the book was relatively useless to them, so they offered it for sale. I paid a negligible fee and postage and got a book I needed at 20% of the price I would’ve paid in Waterstone’s, and they saved themselves unnecessary clutter. In theory, Lonely Planet need to print one less guidebook to Venice, which saves paper, ink, time, money and so on. In essence, this is collaborative consumption.
eBay and Amazon are household names involved in collaborative consumption, whilst ‘Loot’ magazine and car boot sales pre-date these by decades and centuries alike. Some of you may have heard of the CouchSurfers website? Register you sofa online and people who need somewhere to stay for the night (at minimal cost) will contact you from time to time to arrange sleeping on said couch. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but cheaper and greener than staying in one of Lenny Henry’s hotels...
But what about Relay Rides, where you make your car available to others in need of transport, again for a small fee towards petrol etc?
Or TaskRabbit, where those that are cash rich and time poor can post ‘tasks’ (such as walking the dog, collecting dry-cleaning, posting parcel) online, for ‘runners’ to complete for a mutually agreed fee?
What about Zopa then? If you’re as tired of the banking system as everyone else is, why not loan money from a peer at a competitive rate, making repayments at an agreed APR over an agreed time period?
Parkatmyhouse (alternative to the spiralling costs of NCP multi-storeys)?
Bartercard (services for goods, or vice versa)? Thredup (for those fast-growing nippers)?
And there are oodles of tool-sharing groups out there for budget conscious DIY-ers.
Collaborative consumption is a burgeoning movement. Not only does it have the potential to save people huge amounts of time and money, but it also eradicates our obsession with possession and consumption, hitting the cause of our environmental problems instead of looking for ways to allow us to continue in our fatally flawed economic and societal paradigm.
Hybrid cars, eco-tourism and carbon offsetting may well be pieces of the jigsaw, but they are not the ultimate solution.
I’ll leave you with a little statistic. The average power drill is used for 12 minutes in its life. I have never driven down a row of terraced houses and seen every single resident simultaneously engaged in carpentry or other such craft. Thus, I would wager that one power drill could quite easily be shared between the average UK street. The same is probably true of DVDs, books, slow-cookers, bicycles and so on. Collaborative consumption – coming to a street near you soon.
Greenland is a thrilling and provocative piece of theatre exploring the big questions around climate change.
This fast-paced and exhilarating new play draws together several separate but connected stories, which range from a protesting teenager to a man observing wildlife in the Arctic circle to an MP’s assistant negotiating her way through the Copenhagen conference.
Check out the Greenland microsite for special events, rehearsal and production galleries, trailer and more. Special Greenland events include talks by Marcus Brigstocke, David King, Charlie Kronick, Michael Jacobs, Nigel Lawson, Bjørn Lomborg and more.
SPECIAL OFFER Best available seats for just £15. Call 020 7452 3000 quoting ‘ECO GREEN’ or enter promotion code ‘3433’ before selecting your tickets online.
Available 10-15 February. Subject to availability.
One week to show how we can combat climate change - 21 to 27 March 2011
Thousands of events and activities, highlighting the positive steps being taken to help combat climate change, are being planned by organisations from every sector for the UK's first Climate Week.
Climate Week is backed by every part of society - from the Prime Minister to Paul McCartney, the NHS to the National Trust, Girlguiding UK to the CBI, the Big Lottery Fund to the National Association of Head Teachers.
Climate Week is sponsored by a Headline Partner - Tesco - and four Supporting Partners - Aviva, EDF Energy, Kelloggs and RBS.
Organisations can get involved right now by starting to plan an event for Climate Week, entering the prestigious Climate Week Awards or registering to take part in the UK’s biggest ever live environmental competition, the Climate Week Challenge. They can also spread the word in advance, so that others find out about Climate Week in time to plan their own activities.
Individuals can help right now by asking the organisations they know - such as their workplace or local school - to plan an event or activity for Climate Week.
To find out more about Climate Week go to www.climateweek.com email
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or telephone on 020 3397 2601.
So it's that time of year again; the weekend when cupid curls his finger around the twine and takes aim. In some cases, lets hope he strikes the bullseye and melds people in a bubble of happiness. In other cases, lets hope the little mite misses just a tad and actually severs the bonds that hold the more unsuitable couples together. I for one will bid a fond farewell to the unfortunate duo who seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that Poundland is a building soceity, and that by investing their jobseekers allowance there they are safeguarding their litter's future.
But nay, my whinge this week isn't about the great unwashed, rather about the absolute waste of everything that Valentine's Day has become. For starters, it has its origin in Christianity - some Pope or other decided it would be a good idea at some point - so if you're an atheist or a non-believer or of some other faith, there is a confusing issue to start with. Nowadays this celebration of love seems to be owned by a number of high-street card shops, lingerie outlets, chocolatiers and city-break touting travel agents. And I, constantly suspicious of what 'the man' is doing to distract the proletariate, am convinced the placement of Valentine's Day six weeks after Christmas is a conspiracy theory. Most people have just been paid for the first time following the glutonous spending in late December, and the coffers are back in the black. Put Valentine's on 14th January and it's a dead duck - nobody could afford the petrol to the garage to buy a cheap posy of wilting daffs, let alone an elaborate bouquet of roses. Seems to me old Pope Gelasius I knew what he was doing - probably links in to the Da Vinci Code somehow but I'll leave that to Dan Brown...
Anyway, back on to the waste side of things, lets look at the classic Valo gifts one by one...
Chocolates - Milk, yes. Milk means cows. Cows mean methane. Methane, like carbon dioxide, is a greenhouse gas but is twenty-five times more potent than it's more famous cousin. I'm not going to get started on the over-packaging, or the food miles or the fact that they make you fat. Alternative suggestion - locally-sourced produce, or a nice pint of organic milk.
Flowers - According to the Guardian, 55 million roses are traded around the world on the 14th. That means that 55 million roses are put in the bin on the 21st. If you work from the estimate that each rose stem grown in Holland produces 3kg of carbon dioxide emissions, when you hand over that beautiful dozen to your loved one, why not also pass her a bag and a half of building sand, just to demonstrate the carbon effects of this oh so common gesture. Alternative suggestion - some kind of origami flower, or just one rose?
Cards - We all know the scores here don't we; "You had me at hello..", "Love you baby..." and "You're the only one for me... (until next year when we've split up because you were seeing the guy from work behind my back for three months and I only found out because you text the wrong person by mistake one night!)" The global postal industry's carbon emissions are three times that of the much-maligned aviation industry, with 12 million cards delivered by the Royal Mail alone on Valentine's Day. Alternative suggestion - send an e-card, make a card or at the very least give the card to your loved one as opposed to putting in the post. Or don't bother with a card and just tell her how you feel, you cold, awkward thing...
I could go on... jewellery and gold mines and exploitation of workers in developing nations, clothes to replace ones that are pefectly wearable, beauty products that contain palm oils that contribute to the distruction of the rainforests.
How do I ever buy anything you might wonder, if I look behind every product to such a degree?
The answer is simple, I don't. I keep my money in my mattress and only use things I find on the street. This year I'm giving gifts of half eaten chicken tikka kebab, shoe and damaged wooden pallet, all wrapped in an old tarpaulin and sealed down with spent Hubba Bubba. Somehow I don't think I'll have to worry about it next year...
I’m not going to get involved in politics in this blog. Partly because I’m not allowed; the very mention of one of Nyree’s infamous ear-bashings would make David Haye quake in his boots; and partly because I think most politicians are self-serving, self-aggrandising, self-obsessed prats and berks. I also know nothing about politics really, other than the fact that ‘Margaret Thatcher’ is an anagram of ‘That Great Charmer’. I smell ironnnyyy! Anyway, I digress...
I don’t know much about politics really, but I do know that those marginal parties that don’t have a realistic chance of gaining an outright majority for themselves can make fairly outlandish claims in their manifestos to try and entice gullible/extremist voters. The BNP promise to... well I don’t know, but it’s obviously madness. The Liberal Democrats make vague promises they actually meant to do the opposite of – they really should sack whoever edited their manifesto as they appear to have mistaken the word ‘eradicate’ with ‘triple’ in all the sentences relating to tuition fees. Easy mistake to make. Any WWE fans will remember one of the great wrestlers of the early 00’s – ‘Eradicate H’. Might be a bit of an obscure reference that actually... Where was I? Ah yes, and the Green’s, in line with their core policy, promised to create a sustainable society... by reducing a working week to just 27 hours...
The logic behind this is to eradicate (or is that triple?) economic growth, based on the idea that it is impossible to continue to accumulate wealth (often at the behest of nations we imprison in the chains poverty), whilst also reaching a state of absolute sustainability.
27 hours? It sounds like an innovative economic model, and a pirated copy of the new Danny Boyle film. Knocking off after lunch on Thursday? Friday night would be the new Saturday night, so you could go out on the new Saturday night and still watch The X Factor on old Saturday night, and then go out on old Saturday night as well, knowing that normal Sunday is there for eating eggs, ironing the curtains and making jokes about the “bloody squares what used to work thirty-eight hours an’ that!”
Everyone would be less stressed, so ailments like heart disease, high blood pressure, depression and the like would decrease (saving the NHS billions). People would have more time to exercise and stroll around, ridding the world of the super-obese (saving the NHS billions). And crucially, the majority would have more time to get green-fingered and start growing food in their gardens and on allotments, improving the general health of the nation (saving the NHS billions). At this point it is probably worth mentioning I don’t work as some kind of NHS fundraiser, just so you know.
The problem then? If everyone works 28% less hours, it’s only logical that everyone is paid 28% less. Less money basically means less ‘stuff’, and we in the West are obsessed with ‘stuff’. I’ve no doubt that whoever is reading this (well done for getting this far by the way – I know it’s useless ranting but I find it very cathartic) currently has a pile of ‘stuff’ in their house that they got for Christmas that they simply don’t want. Probably £10-£20s worth? I’d say a fair proportion (say 50% for argument’s sake) of the nation has a similar pile. That’s £350-£700m already wasted. Or 118,043,844 work hours at minimum wage. Or enough to supplement the wages of 1,809,655 people on minimum wage to the tune of 11 hours, reducing their working week from 38 to 27 hours...
Is this ever going to happen? No, it is not. Are we more likely to spend billions on a nuclear deterrent system that means we can at least contribute to Earth’s destruction when Kim Yong-Il decides he’s sick of being “wonewy” and presses the red button? Yes. Are the Green Party ever going to be in a position of power that enables them to make this a serious debate? No. But neither is Nick Clegg, so nerrrr...
Ooo, just got political. I can hear Nyree stomping down the doors looking for me. Better dash...
It’s an odd time, Christmas. The clichés and rhetoric will tell you that the chestnuts should be roasting on the open fire, grandpa should be wearing that new reindeer cardigan and quality street wrappers should litter the coffee table. There’s more to it than that though for me...
Forget the Buzz Lightyear figure, the Tamagotchi and the JLS tickets – Christmas isn’t about gifts. It’s about appreciating what you have. We give to those we love by way of expressing how we feel about them. The bows, ribbons and wrapping paper house the feelings we are otherwise incapable of communicating through words, acts or love. We become trapped in a self-perpetuating maelstrom of love and consumption, and each present has it’s own environmental or humanitarian impact, from the Chinese sweatshops banging out the latest iPods, to the exploited poverty-ridden Ethiopians that see a fraction of the money promised when you ‘buy them a goat’ through a household-name charity. But what would Christmas be without the presents, and their associated impacts?
To start with, nobody would go Christmas shopping, so millions of car journeys would cease to be necessary. Whilst the environmentally aware will be buying FSC certified wrapping paper and cards, the masses will be looking for the cheap and cheerful. No presents means there’s nothing to wrap in golden glittery bin-fodder, and in these days of austerity you’d be better of sending an e-card than wasting money on stamps.
Bright an early on Christmas day – Bucks Fizz at ten o’clock (that’s the drink, not the 1981 Eurovision champions). And here-in lies the non-present void. Dinner and trimmings will come later. The Doctor Who special will still be on at seven, and your auntie will still be snoring loudly on the sofa by nine. Is there nothing else that can fill the time between ten and eleven? No other way to express our emotions without plastic gifts and Bangladesh-made textiles?
A poem, a song, a sentence? A moment, a kiss, a hug? A promise of time...?
I’ve moved around a lot – Newcastle, Manchester, Cornwall, Uganda, London, Nottingham, Peterborough, Lincoln – since June 2009. You soon realise that a phone and an Inbox are only disturbed by the people who care about you, and about whom you care. Time is the most valuable gift, whether given or received – and it has absolutely no carbon footprint.
Don’t get me wrong – I love this time of year. I love buying people presents, and receiving them in return. But, with budgets tight and the Cancun talks doing nothing to protect our world, consider giving something other than a product to your loved ones on Saturday. There’ll be no cellotape mess, it’ll save you a fortune, and I’m pretty sure the memory will last longer than any pair of socks...
Having said all this, if you manage to reach a point where you are happy with what you have and exist in a euphoric state of contentedness, please get in touch...
Schools closed. Cars stuck. Daily Mail dismisses global warming as a complete load of cr... apparently winter is upon us. In the same way I use Sue Barker as a dipstick for the emergence of the summer months, I can gauge our descent into winter by the amount of column inches devoted to claiming the latest icy blast has proved climate scientists wrong once and for all, again, for the last time.
Presumably then, at this very moment, scores of experts and PhDs and doctorates are sat dumbfounded in the offices of the International Panel on Climate Change and the Tyndall Research Centre? Heads are being scratched. Brows are being furrowed. Chins are being worried to the extent that beards are being eroded. Millenia of ice cores are being re-examined. Climate models are being run and re-run. The Espresso machine is fit to burst as the brightest minds work through the night...
“But there’s been six centimetres of snow in Whitby, Jobson... we must’ve got something wrong!!!”
“Pull yourself together Watkins, we did the sums on my phone; global warming is going on and that.”
“You’re wrong Jobson... Have you not been outside? It’s quite cold.”
“Quite cold you say? Blimey Watkins. Maybe I did a multiply instead of a divide in that big sum what we did. Get the felt tips and some scrap paper – we’re going to have to think again.”
I joke of course. I’d be very surprised indeed if this scene was being played out anywhere in the world right now. I may well be mistaken of course, but I think it more likely that Jeremy Clarkson and other environmental nay-sayers have got it wrong on this one. God forbid they’re actually right; but it wasn’t too long ago that our best and brightest dismissed the idea of the Earth being round as, and I quote, “poppycock!”
Fortunately, the climate scientists in the aforementioned institutions are actually quite intelligent. They can finish the crossword in The Independent, sometimes understand the questions on University Challenge and probably already know which branch of the Carphone Warehouse this year’s X Factor winner will be working in come April. These chaps and chapettes were even bright enough to stop calling it ‘global warming’ a number of years ago, opting instead for the catchier ‘climate change’. Why? Because there’s more to it than warming.
In simple terms, the amount of energy in our atmosphere is increasing, meaning more extreme weather patterns; hence hot summer followed by cold winter. Fewer, stronger hurricanes in the Caribbean (ask the residents of New Orleans if you don’t believe me). Increased flood risk. More powerful tsunamis. Soon there’ll be no room for Kerry Katona in the paper – darn! And if you think this is mindless hyperbole, check out this rather convincing graph courtesy of the United Nations Environment Programme.
Judging by the reaction of the general public to snow in this country (i.e. tinned food stripped from supermarket shelves, children being forced to wear ALL their clothes while they have a hot bath to warm through, people crashing their cars into hedgerows out of a sense of duty), we as a collective consider snow as an extreme weather. In relative terms, it isn’t. Thousands of people are not going to be evacuated from Salford to take refuge inside Old Trafford. Homes are not being swept away by ‘heavier than last year’ flakes of snow. Snow is about as extreme as Bill Oddie, but that is a moot point.
The point is that a cold snap does not mean global warming/climate change is a myth – quite the opposite. It does mean you’re going to want to turn the central heating up. Don’t. Buy a jumper instead.
Peterborough City Council’s Climate Change team has this week launched their new e-newsletter.
It’s monthly, it’s free and it will keep you up to date with all the Council’s green news. Email
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to sign up.
08:15:50
r live environmental competition, the Climate Week Challenge. They can also spread the word in advance, so that others find out about Climate Week in time to plan their own activities.
