bemoreeco

1. Start a linen (both towels and sheets) reuse program in all guest rooms and inform guests of the program.
2. Educate your staff to turn off lights and turn down heating/air conditioning when rooms are unoccupied.
3. Provide recycling bins both in public areas, in the kitchen, and in the office (including one at each desk) to make recycling as easy as possible.
4. Buy office and guest amenity products that contain recycled material.
5. Use a compost bin for food waste.
6. Create an incentive program to encourage staff to participate in and improve upon environmentally-friendly practices.
7. Provide guests with bicycles, walking maps, and information on public transportation.
8. Use nontoxic or least toxic cleaners, sanitizers, paints, pesticides, etc. throughout the hotel. Make sure all chemicals are stored safely in a well-ventilated area.
9. Buy organic, fair trade, cruelty-free guest amenity products whenever possible.
10. Switch to low-flow toilets or install toilet-tank fill diverters.

For more Eco hotel tips <click here>

While in London on Wednesday the Team at BeMoreEco decided to make a quick visit to Grand Designs Live at Excell in London. Are main aim was to have a look at the Eco buildings which were being showcased at the event.

We visited the future-build theatre by ECO2H2OUSE.  This eco house demonstrated the techologies being used in the building of a low/zero carbon home. In the UK today, an average new house which uses the technology involved will consume 77% less energy for space heating when compared with one built to standard building regulations.

The Eco House uses innovative low-energy technology that has been designed to meet the passive house energy standards and levels of air tightness. The Passive house standard is as follow;

    * Compact form & good insulation

    * Southern orientation & shade considerations

    * Energy-efficient window glazing & frames

    * Highly efficient heat recovery form exhaust air using and air to air heat exchanger

    * Energy-saving household appliances

    * Total energy demand for space heating and cooling of less than 15kWh/m2/yr

The second eco house we toured was the ‘EcoHub’. This cute mini dome-shaped eco pod offers the last word in super energy efficiency. Clad in sustainable wooden or recycled tyre tiles, this two-bedroom, double pod home uses mirco-renewable technology to achives a zero carbon rating. The people at EcoHub are committed to dramatically reduce our carbon footprint. We got on well with them as this is the same aim at we have at MoreEco.

The third eco house we were inspired by, was the landARK. If you have a scrap of land, maybe a back garden, a hillside, a coppice clearing, or maybe eveen a corner of somebody’s car park (plus a few weeks holiday) then this i agreat fun eco house to have. All you need is a rubber mallet, a tape measure, screwdrives, a powerdrive drill and enough peace to read the manual. Checlkout the pictures we have taken.

Finally, the last house we visited was the Cloud 9 stand. These timber eco homes are again made with sustainable timber and come with solar panels, heat recovery ventilation, large windows and open space plan. energy bills for these house are less than £400 per year.

We have uploaded pictures of the Grand Designs Live event taken from the trustworthy BeMoreEco iPhone to MoreEco Flickr account. The slide show is below.

It began in 2004 with 2 guys sitting in a 250 square foot office in Newcastle developing websites for Traidcraft and other fair trade organisations. Next thing you know (it sometimes seems it happened that fast), we’re in a 25,000 square foot warehouse with 40 staff selling 5,000 products to over 100,000 customers.

Ethical Superstore recently joined forces with Natural Collection, can you tell us a bit more about this?

Natural Collection was looking for a new warehouse and Ethical Superstore still had plenty of space, so after meeting at the Green Awards last year we started talking about how we could work together.  As we got to know each other, we soon realised there was so much more we could do together if we merged the businesses.  If all goes according to plan, the Ethical Superstore and Natural Collection online shops will be re-launched with all orders being sent from our (slightly fuller) warehouse in Gateshead in June. 

What makes the Ethical Superstore a great place to work?The Ethical Superstore team – good, friendly, hard working people.  And all the Fairtrade coffee I can drink.

What is the most rewarding part of your job?

Turning the ideas of social business into reality.

Who do you most admire in the green industry?

The person who leads the world to a global climate change agreement.  In the meantime, all the millions who are campaigning for one.

If you could change one thing in the green industry what would it be? 

More innovation of high quality products and services.

How do you feel about the term greenwash?

As part of the solution to the greenwash problem, the development of an independent carbon labelling system would be a useful tool to help consumers make “eco product” purchasing decisions, similar to what the traffic light system is achieving for food.

What advice would you give to someone starting out in the industry today?

Be fanatical about service excellence and quality.  Just because you’ve got a good cause doesn’t mean you can get away with providing an average service. 

What is your vision for an eco Britain ?

I dream about a return to village life.  My first choice would be a farm in Buttermere in the Lake District where I’d also work as a park ranger!

What is the most important piece of information you have ever been told?

Actions speak louder than words.

If you were prime minister for the day, what one thing would you do?

Well given any major decisions could be overturned the next day, perhaps I’d have more impact if I asked everyone who reports to the prime minister that exact same question “If you were prime minister for the day, what one thing would you do?”  Then I’d post their answers on Twitter and the video footage on Youtube.

How do you feel about Obama’s green policies?

I voted for him, but as I said above, actions speak louder than words, so we shall see.

MoreEco Members can earn 8 MoreEco points for every £ they spend at Ethical Superstore. Also for every 10 points  earned  MoreEco will offset 1kg fo carbon for free.

Join today and receive FREE 500 start up points.

Latest Ethical Superstore Offers

An ‘eco-pod’ home, which promises to be more energy efficient than standard houses, has been shown at this year’s Grand Designs show at London’s ExCel Centre.

The 2009 Goldman Prize recipients tackled some of the most pressing environmental issues of the day through grassroots efforts, helping to educate and motivate local communities to get involved in the effort to protect the natural environment around them and to stand up for their rights.

This year’s winners are:

AFRICA
Marc Ona Essangui, Gabon: In Gabon, a country without a culture of civic engagement, Marc Ona led efforts to publicly expose the unlawful agreements behind a huge mining project threatening the sensitive ecosystems of Gabon’s equatorial rainforests. Ona’s efforts led to an unprecedented victory for civil society in Gabon, with the government adopting new environmental oversight regulations and significantly reducing the size of the mining concession.

ASIA
Rizwana Hasan, Bangladesh: Working to reduce the impact of Bangladesh’s exploitative and environmentally-devastating ship breaking industry, leading environmental attorney Rizwana Hasan led a legal battle resulting in increased government regulation and heightened public awareness about the dangers of ship breaking. 

EUROPE
Olga Speranskaya, Moscow, Russia: Russian scientist Olga Speranskaya transformed the NGO community in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia into a potent, participatory force working to identify and eliminate the Soviet legacy of toxic chemicals in the environment. 

ISLANDS AND ISLAND NATIONS
Yuyun Ismawati, Indonesia: As waste management problems mount throughout the Indonesian archipelago, Yuyun Ismawati implements sustainable community-based solutions that provide employment opportunities to low-income people and empower them to improve the environment.

NORTH AMERICA
Maria Gunnoe, USA: In the heart of Appalachia, where the coal industry wields enormous power over government and public opinion, lifelong resident Maria Gunnoe fights against environmentally-devastating mountaintop removal mining and valley fill operations. 

SOUTH AND CENTRAL AMERICA
Wanze Eduards & Hugo Jabini, Suriname: Wanze Eduards and Hugo Jabini, members of Maroon communities originally established by freed African slaves in the 1700s, successfully organized their communities against logging on their traditional lands, ultimately leading to a landmark ruling for indigenous and tribal peoples throughout the Americas to control resource exploitation in their territories.

Founded in 2006, Sustained is a printed magazine and online community. It’s an independent, upbeat, fun, cool-but-not-trendy, light-hearted and non-pretentious group, covering all the topics that surround sustainability – and what’s more it’s FREE! 

The printed magazine is distributed via local networks of organic vegetable boxes and shops, farmers markets, libraries, venues and events across the UK.

The latest issue of Sustained is out now. In Issue 9 and has been sponsored by ‘The Converging World” and is a Carbon Special addition.

They’re always on the lookout for new stockists so if you know an independent vegetable box scheme, organic shop or market trader, they can send FREE copies of the publication for all of their customers!

All you need to do is ask your local wholefood shop to order copies of Sustained for you from their suppliers with their next food order (they are delivered free of charge and come in bundles of 50).  National wholefood suppliers that distribute Sustained are the Suma, Essential and the Rainbow Wholefood co-operatives. If your local shop chooses to order from Suma there’s a catalogue code they can use – BK820.

Then just return a few days later and collect you copies. And if you have an event where you’d like to give them out just get in touch.

To view the magazine online and have a quick read before you order go to www.sustainedmagazine.com.

Sustained: small change – big difference…

It has been reported in The Guardian that Council tax bills could be slashed by millions of pounds if local authorities and consumers improve recycling.

Some people persist in putting food waste, dirty nappies and, in some cases, even dead cats in their recycling bin, which risks contaminating other material. Figures obtained by the consumer group Which? reveal that nearly 230,000 tonnes of recycling and composting material put out by households in England last year was rejected and sent to landfill at a cost to taxpayers of £12m.

 About 5% of items collected from households for recycling, such as paper and glass, are rejected, but some councils rejected more than twice that amount.Which? says that if consumers recycled more effectively, council tax bills would be lower, as it costs councils more to send rubbish to landfill than it does to recycle. Sending rubbish to landfill will cost England £620m this year.

Jess Ross, editor of which.co.uk, said: “Recycling our household waste has never been easier, but more could be done by councils and by consumers to ensure that we recycle more waste more effectively. Not only will it reduce the amount of waste going to landfill, but it could even save us money on our council tax bills.”

Materials for recycling are rejected when they are contaminated – for example if people put the wrong materials in the wrong bin. Which? says that improved collection systems, clearer information for consumers and more careful recycling by householders could reduce the amount that ends up in landfill.

Source; The Guardian

I think that this video should of been played during Earth Day.

In part two of our green wash feature, (part 1) we put the energy and oil companies under the microscope and ask if they are really doing their bit for the environment or pulling green wool over our eyes. Not every company that claims to be green is lying with many businesses spending millions reworking practices to become more environmentally friendly.

This can be demonstrated by Inc.com’s Green 50 which charts what businesses are doing to become more environmentally friendly. However with all these efforts there are many more big companies getting their big green paintbrush out.

Take energy giant Shell for instance. They bought out their big guns to shout about their commitment to a low carbon future but started selling off their Solar business as it wasn’t making ‘much profit’ and putting more money into oil sands. Oxfam criticised Shell in 2008 for massaging its emissions figures of oil sands as a “dangerous green wash” that hides its contribution to further climate change and puts poor people around the world at greater risk

In early 2009, Energy regulator Ofgem sparked controversy by making the decision that power companies wishing to offer green tariffs would be required to make additional efforts to reduce carbon emissions. This means that that currently suppliers offering green tariffs need to demonstrate that they are making additional investment in renewable energy or carbon offsets, on top of their legal obligations. The top six energy companies signed up to this. However this decision was slated by Dale Vince, MD of Ecotricity who accused the six of greenwash and said that this action would divert investment from increasing renewable energy capacity.

So what do consumers think? We know we are getting wiser about greenwashing and the web is helping us spread our distain for it. Consumers are quick to use the web to condemn green washing and voice their skepticism about corporations, researchers from Nielsen Online found during a recent survey.  “When it comes to the environment, consumers are insisting on both transparency and consistency from the corporations they patronise,” said Jessica Hogue, research director for Nielsen Online.

These are a selection of pictures day from the Earth Day Network.

 
Find more photos like this on Earth Day