With Christmas over and a new year begun, many people’s attention has passed to what their New Year’s Resolution should be. Maybe it’s to save up for a holiday, wedding or new home; diet for a holiday, wedding or… just to become more healthy in general. Perhaps you’ll set your sights on learning, with an evening course or a degree, or opt for a smaller aim like not biting your nails any more, or becoming more tolerant. Whatever your choice of personal or lifestyle improvement, we thought there may be a bit of space on the list for a Green New Year’s Resolution.
Category Archives for Ethical Shopping

5 Top Ideas for Eco Christmas Gifts
Christmas is now just around the corner, so with many of us still watching our spending, why not take a look at these Top Ten ideas for an Eco Christmas Gift for your friends and family. Many of the ideas give you a personalised handmade option that costs more in time than money, so if you get started now, you’ll be finished and wrapped for Christmas Day, no problem!

Pigging Out!
Before Christmas I started having fond memories of raising our own two pigs for meat around 5 years ago. Now, living in a mid terrace house, I don’t think my neighbours would particularly appreciate the grunting of a four legged porcine creature lurking at the bottom of the garden, so raising our own animals at our current home is not an option. However a couple of years ago, a butcher opened in the street at the top of our road who had the answer to my quandary!

Eco Xmas Wrapping
This weekend has seen me create the first attempt at my eco wrapping gift ideas. OK, so some of you will be thinking, that is way too organised to have gifts ready for wrapping, but there will be others more organised than I have been who already have bags of gifts wrapped, tagged and ready for delivery to friends and family members as Yuletide approaches, but I have to say I am very proud of my first gift wrapping creation!

flooringsupplies.co.uk Receive FSC Accreditation
Online flooring retailer flooringsupplies.co.uk have received an FSC accreditation which enables the company to use the well known FSC logo on a number of their engineered wood flooring products following chain-of-custody certification by SGS. SGS is a company providing verification and certification services to ensure particular requirements and standards regarding safety, performance and quality are met.

Is Fast Fashion Becoming a Fast Fad?
The world of fashion is a fickle craze; no sooner has one trend gathered momentum than another disappeared into the fashion graveyard. Keeping up with the latest styles is not only an expensive hobby, it’s also apparent that this conspicuous consumption is dramatically affecting the environment.

Greening Your Shopping Basket
The food sitting in tins, bottles, cardboard boxes and plastic bags in your cupboards and fridges can have a huge impact on your family’s carbon emissions. Processed convenience food, is the answer for many people who need to get around the problem of a hectic lifestyle, but it has a huge disadvantage; the amount of energy required to produce it. In addition, the amount of additives, preservatives and artificial colours and flavourings contained in a lot of processed food, although being reduced by some manufacturers, is still a consideration when choosing what to buy.

Brixton Pound Moves Town Closer To ‘Transition Town’ Status
Brixton will be taking a step in the direction of market towns Stroud, Totnes and Lewes with the launch of the Brixton Pound on Thursday 17th September. As the economy is still in the throes of recession, the concept of transition towns is being looked at as a model that could help ease the economic tensions by encouraging communities to become more self-supporting, as well as helping combat the problems of peak oil and climate change added to by transportation of goods from around the world.

Chicken Out! Goes Out And About To Promote Free Range Chicken
The Chicken Out! team are going out and about on a tour of a number of UK cities over the 39 days spanning between 10th August and 17th September. The tour will last the same amount of days as a broiler house chicken lives, from the day of hatching to the day they are shipped to the supermarket shelves.
48% Reduction In Carrier Bag Usage; 2% Short Of Target
Back in February Gordon Brown threatened supermarkets that unless they took action to reduce the amount of carrier bags given away, currently 1 billion bags every year of which many are shipped off to landfill after a single use, the government would pass legislation forcing supermarkets to act.

How to make your kitchen appliances more environmentally friendly
For many people, the kitchen is the hub of the home; a busy room where lots goes on. For that reason the kitchen can also be one of the best places to start if you want to take steps to reduce your carbon footprint. The following information can help you take ten easy steps to cut carbon from your lifestyle and help make your home an eco home. In many cases, cutting your carbon emissions can also reduce the amount of money you spend running your home; money you can then spend on yourself, your family or making other more environmentally friendly choices to help green other aspects of your lifestyle too.

Compassion In World Farming Encourage Home Cooks To Bake With Compassion
Animal welfare organisation Compassion in World Farming have organised the Bake With Compassion week to promote baking with free range eggs and help campaign against caged and battery production. The weeklong campaign will take place between 6th and 12th July and aims to raise money through fundraising events to help promote the chickens’ cause.
Greenpeace Take A Step In The Right Direction Against Climate Change
A new campaign launched by environmental campaign group Greenpeace is calling on consumers to take steps to help increase awareness about the detrimental effects that the footwear industry can have on the world’s rainforests.

Sony Ericsson GreenHeart Introduces New Green Mobile Phones
The Green Village recently attended a roundtable discussion about Sony Ericsson’s new GreenHeart mobile phones. The company wants to position themselves as the greenest electronics company in the world and to lead other companies to follow in their footsteps.

Thames Water Announce Winner Of ‘London On Tap’ Carafe Competition
Industrial designer Neil Barron has been announced the winner of the ‘London on Tap‘ competition to design a stylish sustainable carafe for London’s bars, restaurants and businesses. His design, which from above looks like the top of a tap, hence the name, will be available in clear and frosted versions, and later this year in blue and green.