I’ve just read about Ruby the pygmy goat at The Centre for Alternative Technology near Machynlleth in North Wales. Ruby must be worth her weight in gold.  Did you know, they use her poo in their  anaerobic digester which turns it into gas?  She makes enough gas to boil the water they use to sterilise laboratory equipment.

Wouldn’t it be great to have one of those digester things for dog poo?

Hmm! Have you seen these headlines?

Sky News tells us ”Sell-By Date Binned In Push To Cut Food Waste… in a bid to cut £12billion worth of good food” going to waste. The Daily Mail front page tells that simpler labels will save families up to £680 a year. Wow that’s a lot of money.

Can you believe we waste so much food? But there has been confusion about the various ways food is labelled and what exactly this means for you and me.

Some foods are labelled with a Display Until or Sell By date as well as either a Use By or Best Before date.  It is only the Use By or Best Before date that we need to look at and it is useful to understand the difference.  The other dates are for the shops to help them with stock control.  The Use By date is the one you and I need to take most notice of.  This is the date used for food safety reasons and soon to help food producers label their foods they will have a decision tree ‘asking a series of important questions around the production of a food product from a microbiological perspective’. In other words could it make us ill!

The Best Before date is a guidance date to show when food may start to deteriorate in quality. This doesn’t mean we can’t still eat it.

Now the truth is I know I should be pleased that people all over the country are reading these headlines and might think twice next time they pull something from the cupboard with a best before date of last month. Maybe now they won’t just sling it, they might at least give it a sniff and a lick and 9 times out of 10 will realise it will go down a treat. Yes, I’m delighted, I’m jumping for joy (with a little help from Yolanda).

I’m a tad concerned I might have to hunt for my supper a bit harder from now. Oh for the rich pickings that ‘Best Before’ date afforded me!

How do we get people to think of ‘materials’ rather than ‘waste’? If only the word ‘waste’ could be permanently resigned to the trash. Can manufacturers be forced to think about how their products would be redeployed at the end of their useful life? Can we reverse this ‘throw-away’ economy we’ve adopted in recent years?

A little birdie told me that at Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream Factory in the Netherlands it is not just their mint ice cream that will be green.

They are installing a bio-digester which converts natural waste products into gas. It’s thought that this should provide 40% of the factory’s green energy requirements. How cool is that?

While all around me were watching re-runs of Doctor Who and enjoying yet more turkey sandwiches and mince pies I got my thinking cap on and got Googling to green up my website.

I’d already signed up with Good Energy, a 100% Renewable Energy company, for my electricity supply but after lots of searching for a company that doesn’t seem to charge a premium for being eco-friendly  I’ve transferred my web hosting to GreenGeeks.  Take a look at this link to find out more about how GreenGeeks web hosting is green.

What I’d like now of course is to see my favourite social networking sites clean up their act too. Will 2011 be the year they do?

Hmnn!  Now there’s a thought.

There’s a lot I can’t even begin to understand when it comes to carbon footprint, but to my mind you have to start with what you can and do understand and go one step at a time.

There has been much debate about the carbon footprint of a Google search but this article quotes Google as saying:

In fact, in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than Google uses to answer your query.

So… in an attempt to green up my green blog in every way I can, I’m pleased to say that my super efficient net-book computer is now powered by 100% Renewable Energy from Good Energy.   I’ve looked into peddling my way to powering up my computer but got nowhere fast so I was delighted to find an alternative that avoided the saddle sores.

Next I’m looking into greening up my web hosting. Any suggestions? Please send them in.

Big Thanks.

Gizmo

We have all heard of reduce, reuse, recycle.  But Dianna Cohen, co-founder of the Plastic Pollution Coalition suggests a fourth R.  Watch her video clip:

It does drive me mad when I am shopping and somebody puts my purchases into a plastic bag.  I used to feel too embarrassed to make them take it out again so I could put it into my own reusable bag. But, NO! I have a right to REFUSE. And REFUSE I will.  Please join me!

Gizmo

I’ve just eaten the last apple from my tree.  It is only young – I planted it about three years ago, but it gave me quite a few apples and they were delicious.

Lots of people have fruit trees in their gardens but you’d be amazed how many people don’t like to pick and eat their own fruit. Some of my apples were perfect but others had a few blemishes and one or two had been tucked into by a few crawly creatures. I Picked them anyway, and  Yolanda and I turned the manky ones into crumble with some hedgerow blackberries. Yum!

I do know of people who have so much fruit even just from one tree, they couldn’t possibly eat it all.  Help is at hand! Around the country there are a number of fruit picking groups that will harvest fruit from your trees, give you any fruit you’d like to keep and then give the rest to charities, such as centres for the homeless.

I will try to find out whether there is a nationwide list or website where people can find details of their nearest group.  When I do I’ll be sure to post it here but in the meantime a few groups are listed in this article in Time Out.

Gizmo

The world’s largest wind farm opens today off the coast of Kent. Yolanda and I followed the various news articles and learned that enough power would be generated for 200,000 homes.

Now to me that’s a big figure, but then I did a little research and realised there are more than 20 million homes in the UK, so it really is a drop in the ocean, this wind farm in the sea.

This made me think about the amount of energy I use and what more I could do to save energy. One of the more surprising tips I came across was that a modern laptop computer uses around 85% less energy than a desktop computer.

I made that switch, so I’m off to a good start. I always make sure I unplug my laptop when I’m not using it, I put it on standby if I’m just away briefly and need to come back as it takes no time at all to pop up all my work again, but more recently, I’ve been concentrating on trying to finish everything off that I need to do, so I can shut down, chill out and escape from cyberspace once in a while.

p.s.

I’ve been looking in to ways of producing my own energy. Yolanda says I should have my own wind farm, but I have to say I’m not sure she isn’t just being rude about my bodily habits.

I came across this interesting perspective on green efforts as I was surfing the web. I love the fact it points out that two people cycling a mile powered by cheeseburgers is the same carbon footprint as those same two people sharing a lift in an efficient car! No wonder my head spins from doing my carbon footprint equations….

Of course, it isn’t mentioning the fact that those two people would probably eat their cheeseburgers anyway, even if they weren’t cycling to work, and worse – because they didn’t cycle to work, they notice the pounds piling on so they get in their car again to drive another mile to the gym to work off the calories.  On the way home they are starving, after all that exercise on the fake bike at the gym, so they take a little detour – only a mile – in their fuel efficient car via MacDonald’s and treat themselves to another cheeseburger before bed.

You see…. they should have gone by bike after all.