bemoreeco

The summer of 2005 was a strange summer. For no reason other than to show support of various charities, millions of brits began wearing coloured wristbands. It was the biggest fashion trend of the year. We seemed to be on the verge of something important, some deep psychological change towards charity and fashion.

There was only one problem. The wristbands looked awful.

Now many brilliant companies are using recycled materials to create fashionable jewelry. Today you can make your eco-statement, and look great.Here are a few pointed out by Great Green Goods over the past week or two:

Seven Products from Amazing Created from Recycled Trash: If you want your jewelry to tell a story, then how about the magazine bracelet? This bracelet is handcrafted in Sao Paulo by the homeless as part of a drug rehabilitation program.

Or if you’re really looking to make your statement, then how about Recycled Floppy Disk Bracelets. This wont be for everyone, but it’s certain to get your eco-convictions noticed. The images will explain all.

A good UK entry is the Beaucoco Recycled Plastic Pleat Jewelry. Here Beaucoco modify recycled plastic bags to create an intricate style.

Finally, this one is my personal favourite. Great Green Goods points out jewelry from recycled car parts. Between £25 - £100, you can wear some of these brilliant items made by Hi-Octane. They’re pricey, but they look amazing. Just look at some of these pictures:

A wedding day should be your perfect day. You want to look beautiful and feel great. In this era of heightened ethical awareness this has become a problem. How great can you feel wearing a wearing dress made by a 3rd world labourer? Or a wedding dress which required thousands of silk worms to be boiled alive?

This is a problem that Kate Carter has tackled in today’s Guardian. Kate explains the usual ethical dilemma with wedding dresses and suggests some great, ethically-made, alternatives.

“Many ethical fashion companies use hemp silk a blend of the two materials which produces a lovely weighted fabric. And this brings me to my top pick for an ethical bridesmaid dress (which would actually be a great wedding dress too) – Ciel’s hemp silk Jasmine dress. It’s even on sale, which puts the £175 price tag in your budget. It also has the advantage of being a classic, incredibly flattering cut that you will be able to wear again and again. Also in the Ciel sale, the mint green Grecian-style halter dress (£125) is another top pick.

If you prefer something in a more striking colour, The Natural Store has a great fushcia pink dress by Ethika, a fair trade co-operative in Pakistan, for £137.99.”

You can read the full article on the Guardian website.

This is a great example of a green product that will save you money. It’s the Energenie Automatic Standby Shutdown.

It’s quite simple and quite clever. You plug your laptop, TV or entertainment system into the Energenie. Then you plug the Energenie into the the plug socket. Whenever your appliance goes on to standby mode, the Energenie will cut off electricity. Taken from the Energenie website:

After going into standby mode, Energenie automatically cuts off the electricity supply, reducing your energy consumption and saving you money. It’s quick, safe and simple.

Standby Shutdown is 13 amp rated so you can use it with any appliance that goes into standby mode including…
Television, DVD player, Radio, CD player / Hi-fi, PC monitor, Printer, Games console

The Energenie will cost £12.99, which from the website appears to be a special introductory price. Personally, I would love to see bulk-order discounts to encourage using these on several appliances at once.

As Alternative Consumer points out, the downside is if you have multiple appliances connected at once. All will be shut off once one appliance is placed on standby.

The creativity of our friends across the Atlantic never ceases to amaze me. How about you?

Now a company called Noon Solar have introduced a range of handbags with solar panels attached on one side. This handbag can recharge your phone or iPod whilst you’re on the move.

Perhaps even more importantly, unlike other attempts at the solar-powered handbag, this one looks great. Just look at the pictures on the Noon Solar website.

At $330 and up they are not the budget option, but then they are in the same range of the more fashionable handbags. Will you be buying one? If not, why not?

(Via Inhabitat).

Since the beginning of 2008, a loaf of bread will probably cost you over a pound. It was only 50 – 60p at the turn of the century, so that is quite a big increase. Likewise, other items are noticeably more expensive. Rice and Pasta cost up to 60% more than they did last year.

But lets focus on bread for a minute. There are 4 major factors making bread so expensive at the moment.

1)  Rising fuel costs. Everything costs energy to make and deliver, and the rising cost of oil had made it more expensive to bake bread. So supermarkets like Waitrose, Tesco and Asda are charging more for it.

2)  Wheat costs more. Farmers have been financially encouraged to use land which would traditionally have grown wheat and other crops, to grow corn-based ethanol and other plants which can produce biofuel. This means less land for wheat and higher prices. The irony is that this second problem was meant to resolve the first.

3)  Rising demand. Emerging countries like China, India and Brazil have a rapidly growing middle class. This middle class is discovering they like different things in their diet, namely bread. This creates a bigger demand, and higher prices.

4)  Bad Weather. Bad weather isn’t so new to us in the UK, but the last two years haven’t been kind to farmers. Around the world harvests have not been good and this has helped caused food crisis.

Are the prices going to stay this high? No, at least not in the short term. We’re likely to see a small dip in the future as the oil speculators drop their prices, the government reconsiders biofuels and the weather might improve. The prices wont drop down much, and then it will just be temporary.  But in the long term, yes, we’re going to have to get used to paying £1 and beyond for a loaf of bread.

It might be time to bake your own.

Earth First, long the brilliant and occasionally snarky crusader of all things green, has been running a great series examining the green credentials of Star Wars films. This week it turned its spotlight to Return of the Jedi. Here are a few of the findings:

Yoda–like all of the Jedi that bit it in the first three films–doesn’t leave his body behind to become more carbon dioxide in the swamps of Dagobah (which is a perfect example of what Florida will look like in 100 years). No, he is absorbed into the power of the force, preventing his breakdown (or his funeral pyre) from releasing the C02 in his little green body into the atmosphere.

[...Emporer electrifying Luke]. This might be the most eco-friendly thing the Empire does, which isn’t saying all that much because the Emperor uses it to try to kill Luke. Just think of the electricity he’s creating when launching the deadly arc at young Skywalker; he could probably power a city for months. If only Order 66 had been to trap all the Jedi in a power plant instead of killing them.

Also be sure to read Earth Green’s take on the original Star Wars film, and The Empire Strikes Back. Especially this gem:

[On Yoda]…He lives in a tree. When he needs a weapon against R2-D2 he uses a stick. Those are clearly some organic threads. He picks up that starship that Luke just seemed content to litter Dagobah with. And oh yeah- HE’S FSCKING GREEN, literally.

WALL-E is the perfect film at the perfect time. The film is set more than 700 years in the future. Consumerism has destroyed the planet, rubbish is everywhere. Humans have been living on a giant ship in space whilst a company sent robots to clean up all the rubbish and make the air breathable again.

I wont spoil much more than that, only to say that if you’re looking for a way of explaining the purpose of all this environmentalism to your kids, take them to see WALL-E. The beginning is like a children’s version of Blade Runner.

There is also a healthy dose of obesity, and a streak of dark humour for us grown-ups.

Believe the reviews, it really is the greatest children’s film since Toy Story.

This is pretty. This is environmentally friendly.

…and it’s too damned expensive.

Still, marvel at the Lightning GT - Britain’s first electric sports car. At £120,000 you will never be able to afford it, but with a little luck you might be able to point one out to your friend sometime. It will probably have a green-campaigning celebrity behind the wheel.

As plucked from The Telegraph:

But the sleek £120,000 sports car runs on 30 onboard rechargeable batteries and emits no direct greenhouse gas emissions.

Ten minutes of battery charging will allow the driver to travel 200 miles and the “regenerative braking” means the batteries receive a boost every time the car decelerates.

Despite their price, cars like these are important. It changes the image of ‘green. Green companies cosying up with great designers is a good thing. Green stops being the charity/recycling option and becomes the premium option. There is good money in that.

If you’re interested in the car be sure to read David Adams’ opinion.

And luckily, the Telegraph has listed nine of the best green cars available in the UK. Many are affordable and rather impressive.

This is a must read. Lucy Siegle, quite possibly the UK’s top environmental journalist, and all-round eco-advocate, has explained why you need to green during the credit crunch. Lucy tackles the notion that being green is too expensive. Instead, Lucy points out several easy ways that most households can save money.

“Take food waste, for example - the issue on everyone’s lips, including Gordon Brown’s, but languishing in everyone’s bin bags. Were we to bin the expensive habit of chucking away a third of what we buy rather than the actual produce, then we could stop dispatching 4.1m tonnes of edible food to landfill, stop the inherent greenhouse gas emissions and save the cold, hard currency.

[...] Nigel Berman (nigelsecostore.com) suggests a startup kit consisting of energy-saving light bulbs, a Radiator Boosterâ„¢, Ecoballsâ„¢ (instead of washing powder - although, it must be said, these are made from polluting PVC), an Ecobuttonâ„¢ (it shuts down a desktop computer) and a standby kit (it turns all remote-controlled appliances off standby). The startup kit can easily slash £367 off the average household bill.“

The article is a great read, and I strongly urge you to spend twenty minutes investigating if you can implement a few of the great ideas.

Education prepares our children to contribute to society. Children learn about maths, science, english, geography, history and more. These subjects haven’t changed much in the past half-century.

Which is a shame.

It means that no pupil will ever receive a GCSE in Climate Change. It means the biggest issue of their lifetime will be relegated to sub-topics within Geography, Science and Politics. It means it will never receive the same credibility as things that have happened in the past (History), or objects of discourse (Art), or even Dance.

If we’re not serious enough about climate change to demand its own qualification, and to recognise that it will help our children contribute to society, then why should our children take it seriously?