Yay! Google came up trumps again.

A company based in Bristol, Environmental Media Solutions, take VHS video cassettes which they recycle 100%. And they do it for free.

I spoke to the lovely peeps at EMS about their recycling service and they told me all about the various collection schemes they are setting up around the country.

If you are not local to one of their schemes and you have the urge to clean out your cupboards, you can post your video cassettes to them.  There’s some important legal-eagle stuff – just a form you have to send with your cassettes but it won’t take you a moment to download it and fill it out. Check out their website to find out more: http://www.ems-europe.co.uk/vhs_recycling.php

Over the coming months you should see more and more local schemes being set up, so keep an eye out at your supermarket, your recycling centre or maybe your local council offices, community centre, school or library.

I’ll keep you posted of any new schemes I hear about

Gizmo

I can’t help noticing a connection between being very rich and producing aluminium. That got me wondering … what is it about aluminium? Do we use too much of the stuff or is it really worth its weight in gold?

Armed with a well known brand of low calorie soft drink  (in a fully recyclable aluminium can) I did a bit of arm chair exercise surfing for aluminium facts and figures.  Here are a few gems that might be worth their weight in…well maybe not gold, but certainly aluminium. What do you think?

Fact 1. 75% of aluminium ever used is still in use today.

Fact 2. Recycling one tonne of aluminium saves nine tonnes of CO2. One tonne of CO₂ is equivalent to driving 2,800 miles.

Fact 3. All aluminium products can be recycled after use. That includes milk bottle tops, tin foil, the foil wrapper on chocolates (my fave).

Fact 4. Tin foil can be washed and reused several times then recycled. It’s ok – they are so rich they won’t begrudge the likes of you and me saving a couple of quid a year by re-using our tin-foil occasionally

Fact 5. Aluminium can be recycled over and over and over again.

Fact 6. The energy needed to melt aluminium scrap is only a fraction of that required for primary aluminium production.

Fact 7. Drinks cans account for 65% of aluminium used in the UK.

Fact 8.Recent figures reveal the drinks can recycling recycling rate is on 55%

Fact 9. That means that 45% of this precious material is needlessly thrown away

Fact 10. No wonder the aluminium rich are getting richer.

ok… so the last one is not a fact but the fact remains we CAN do better.

http://www.everycancounts.co.uk/

http://www.alupro.org.uk/aluminium-and-the-carbon-economy/aluminium-packaging-facts/

If next year’s figures are better I’ll be doing the can-can to celebrate…

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?

Do you find that you are buying loads of little presents for friends?  Can you remember what you bought last year?  What do you get for them without it costing a fortune?

There are loads of cheap stocking filler Christmas presents in the shops to tempt us away from our hard-earned cash, but some of it is just rubbish and a few days after Christmas that’s where it will probably end up.

A few ways we can avoid the mountain of Christmas junk:

• Avoid stuff that will probably just break.
• Steer clear of stuff that has more packaging than product.
• Try doing a secret santa so that you can spend a little bit more on just one person but a lot less overall.  That way you can probably find something a bit more useful.

Here are a few ideas for a more eco-friendly secret santa:

• A wind-up torch – £4.99 from Amazon
• An elephant poo jotter – £3.99 from Oxfam
• A voucher for downloading music
• Lip balm or hand cream – look out for products in recycled/recyclable plastic bottles or pots like the ones at the Body Shop
• Chocolates, look out for recyclable packaging such as paper and foil and check out the fairtrade products

Are you dreaming of a green Christmas?

• Glass is 100% recyclable and can be recycled endlessly with no loss of quality.
• Glass recycling creates no additional waste or by-products. 
• Recycling just one glass bottle saves enough energy to power a sixty-watt light bulb for one hundred minutes, a computer for thirty minutes or a television for twenty minutes.
• For every six tons of recycled container glass used, a ton of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, is reduced.
• Every ton of recycled container glass made into new containers saves 1.2 tons of raw materials.

 How cool is that!

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The other day Yolanda informed me that eating 5 sausages – even if they were pork and leek – didn’t count towards my five a day. My first thought was ‘Is this true?’ bUt most things Yolanda says turn out to be true, no matter how much you wish they weren’t. So the next thing I thought about was apples.

I like apples.

However …..

The apples on the tree in the community copse were nowhere near ready.  So I thought I’d try and buy some. It appears that we have run out of apples in the UK. The only apples my hard earned pennies could have bought had flown half-way round the world.  How’s that for a carbon footprint, I thought.

Yolanda always says ‘Don’t buy apples that have flown farther than a Virgin Atlantic 747′.

So today it was a toss-up between plums from Spain or nectarines from Italy. I plumped for the nectarines.

Gizmo