bemoreeco

London’s first biogas fuelling station has been installed at Camden council’s York Way Depot reports Petah Marian, from GreenBang. As part of a commercial trial between Gasrec, Veolia Environmental Services and Iveco, a CBM (compressed biomethane) powered street cleansing vehicle will now roam the streets of Camden.

The fuelling station will be able to provide the trial vehicle with fuel for its 60 mile a day route for the next six months.

The trial will help evaluate the suitability of CBM and its scope will also be widened to allow the council to fuel vehicles in its fleet from the depot.

For full article <click here>

This is a handy new tool from Carbon Planet. It lets you enter in your next flight details and work out how much CO2 your trip will cause. Not everyone on the plane, just you. Though it does assume a full flight. As we know, this isn’t always the case.

Anyhow, it’s a good estimate and it even divides between economy, business class and first class. So try it out before your next trip, then use a CO2 offsetting program to fly carbon neutral.

Also be sure to read the two supplement pdf guides on Greenhouse Gas Flight Emissions and the Myths of aviation CO2.

So this is it. Less than a month after we began our search to find the UK’s greenest low-fares airline we’re down to the final two, Flybe and EasyJet. Flybe reached the finals after defeating Aer Lingus (3 - 2) and Ryanair (3 - 2). EasyJet reached the finals with stellar victories over Thomson Fly (4 - 1) and Monarch (4 - 1). Now it’s time to decide, once and for all, who’s the UK’s greenest low-fares airline.

The Basics:

Flybe

Flybe, formerly Jersey European Airways, has not grown as quickly as other airlines. It’s only in the past 6 years that company has come onto the scene. First it was renamed British European in 2000, and then Flybe in 2002 with a repositioning as a low-fares aline. In 2007 Flybe took over BA Connect, British Airway’s’ regional service. BA currently owns 15% of the company.

EasyJet

Wasn’t Airline a great program? It’s probably annoying that it did so much to promote EasyJet at the time. EasyJet is Ryanair’s biggest competitor and has remained at the forefront of the low-cost airline movement. Most Recently EasyJet has purchased GO, expanded into Gatwick Airport and plans to move in to Manchester too.

Head to Head

Easyjet is the greenest low-fares airline in the UK. Generally speaking, it’s been an interesting investigation. There is a major split in the low-fares airline community at the moment about how to tackle climate change. Three airlines, EasyJet, Flybe and Monarch are actively taking steps to tackle the problem. Thomson Fly gets caught saying they want to but not making any actions to support it. The rest, Ryanair, Aer Lingus and BMI Baby either ignore the problem or often deliberately provoke environmentalists.

I hope you enjoyed reading this, it’s been fun to write.

Catch up on what you’ve missed so far:

BLFA Semi-Final: Monarch 1 - 4 EasyJet

BLFA Semi-Final: Ryanair 2 - 3 Flybe

BLFA Round One: Thomson 1 - 4 Easyjet

BLFA Round One: BMI Baby 1 - 4 Monarch

BLFA Round One: Aer Lingus 2 - 3 Flybe

BLFA Round One: Ryanair 3 - 2 Jet2

BeMoreEco Launches Battle of the Low Fares Airline

It’s Friday again, thanks heavens. That means it must be time for another roundup of this weeks dumbest green ideas. So without delay…

Dumb Green Idea: Solar-powered neck-tie

This got a lot of attention thos week, mainly because it’s an incredibly dumb green idea. No doubt it’ll spread amongst the celebs needing the green cred. It’s a Solar Powered neckie. It’s ambitious, but extremely foolhardy. First, ties are going out of fashion these days. Second, it looks awful. Really, really, awful. The artists impressions don’t help at all. Third, do people really spend much time in the sun?

Ah, yes, and there is a jacket.

Why not a solar powered umbrella?

How Dumb? 6/10

Dumb Green Idea: Gwyneth Paltrow Stars in Fur Ad

Gwyneth Paltrow has been commended by environmentalists of late. She’s encouraged supports to eat an organic vegetarian diet and recently hosted a charity benefit to save horses from slaughter. So it’s extraordinary that her agent would let her star in an ads for fur-lined boots and bags. PETA elegantly stated "Paltrow’s beauty is only skin deep".

Not to mention reports on Sprig that she refused to mingle with the common folk at her horse-slaughter fundraiser.

How Dumb? 7/10

Dumb Green Idea: PETA to buy Sea World?

That’s right. Shamu and co might soon be set free into the big bad ocean. Where, apparently, they’ll last about five seconds before wondering where the guy with the bucket of fish has gone, or why that big toothy creature is starting to swim mighty close.

PETA apparently wants to buy Sea World and setup a virtual reality theme park on the site, release some of the animals and put the rest in a marine life centre.

Ambitious, certainly. Dumb, most definitely. The animals at the Sea World resort are entirely reliant upon humans and they offer visitors a rare chance to admire brilliant creatures. In comparison with zoos in Beijing and India, the conditions for the animals are far better.

How Dumb? 8/10 - Some things just aren’t meant to be.

Dumb Green Idea: Bush’s Stealth Attack on Endangered Species

Talk about sneaky, at the moment when half the country is on vacation and the other half are watching the Olympics, George Bush is try to sneak through some legislation that will prevent biologists from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Marine Fisheries Service from advising federal agencies evaluating projects that could impact endangered species.

Those that would make the decisions, if this act is passed, would be agencies including the forest Service, the Minerals Management Service and the Department of Transportation. Mostly for projects in which approval would benefit them (e.g. timber allotments and mining roads).

Luckily the Press Association spotted it, and others got wind. Obama has pledged to nullify the act.

How Dumb? 7/10 - Surely they knew someone would spot the advert?

Here is a simple way you can be greener, right now, without leaving your comfy office chair. You can install this free software tool which will tweak your PC settings and save you energy. Here’s what the brilliant Lifehacker website made of it:

Edison allows you to set different energy preferences for work and non-work time, then choose the times you want each profile to run. The power settings determine how long your PC should wait before turning off the display, powering down your hard drive, and suspending your computer. After you set your preferences, Edison also estimates your yearly savings in terms of money, energy, and CO2 emissions. Edison is freeware, requires .NET 2.0 and an email address for registration.

After you download and install Edison, you might also like to read about Lifehacker’s best tips for going green with your PC and their article on Local Cooling.

Today I was absolutely thrilled to see that Inhabitat, one of our favourite blogs, has launched a new green site dedicated to helping parents with young children and babies stay green. The site was founded by Jill Fehrenbacher, a new mother herself, and she leads a supporting team of writers and contributors.

Early posts have included Eco-friendly maternity wear, a review of eco baby-bottles and a behind the baby brand piece with Adiri.

It’s certainly recommended reading. To mark the launch of the new website, Inhabitots readers that sign up today will be entered into a prize draw. The winner of the draw will receive a basket of green baby products worth over $225.

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.

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?

HippyShopper, the brilliant green blog concerning all things fashionable, green, and sometimes rather quirky, has released a great roundup of this summer’s great green fashion.

If you’re looking for a great read from a reliable source, then Abi and co at HippyShopper is a great place to start. Head on over and read the reviews.

 

We didn’t want to do this, but some of the green ideas we hear about merit special attention. So from now on we’re going to highlight the dumbest green idea of the week. Winning wont be easy, the competition this week has been particularly fierce. Here are the top three entries:

1) Wallace Broecker and his Giant Trees

BBC News reports that Wallace Broecker, the man who coined the term ‘global warming’ has finally found its solution. Why not plant giant artificial trees to pull CO2 from the air? He claims that 20m of these “Carbon Scrubbers” could capture all the CO2 produced in the US.

With just an investment of £303bn a year, 60m of these 50ft high artificial trees could absorb all of the CO2 produced worldwide.

2) The ASUS6 Bamboo Laptop

Abi at Hippyshopper (via Techdigest and Gizmodo) contributes to the debate with a not quite so green laptop from ASUS. You can read about the original idea here:

What began as an environmentally-friendly laptop with a bamboo casing, has become a powerful beast of a laptop with a strip of bamboo glued on top. You can see the remarkable transformation from the two images below.

3) Environmentally Friendly Bombs

This one comes in from Earth First (Via: Yahoo News). Not content with dropping bombs on hapless oil-dwellers, the USA has decided to reduce it’s bad-karma footprint with these environmentally-friendly bombs. Unlike those toxin-spewing, debris-spraying, bombs of the Vietnam/Iraq generation, these ones have these derive most of their explosive energy from nitrogen instead of carbon like TNT and most other bombs do. In initial experiments, G2ZT and HBT produced fewer toxic byproducts than common explosives. Still, they did generate some dangerous hydrogen cyanide gas.

And the winner is: The ASUS6 Bamboo(less) Laptop

Yes, the environmentally-irrelevant laptop takes it. At least the environmentally friendly-bombs and giant artificial trees were unflinchingly stupid ideas. ASUS didn’t so much flinch as run and dive behind a giant rock in the face of possible fire regulations. There is a lesson to be learned here, don’t announce and reveal a prototype unless you’re fairly certain it’s not going to catch fire (bonus tip: wood burns). Have some before and after images:

What it was meant to be:

And what it became:

 

Other contenders included the Amsterdam cycle path, Carbon Ration Cards and Recycled Alien Tables.