Another option to manage junk and unwanted communications

In this lead up to the local elections, I am more conscious of the amount of junk mail we get through our letter box.

Most people have come across the Mail Preference Service, which is a free service to help you manage that unwanted junk mail that usually ends up straight in the recycling unread (at least if you are anything like our household).

I got an email about a new free service called Choose Your Mail, which takes the MPS a bit further by allowing you specify what direct mail you don't mind receiving.

Apparently, UK households receive something like 6.3 billion items of junk mail per year and most of it ends up in the bin unread.

In addition, if you receive annoying cold calls on the telephone, there is also the Telephone Preference Service to try out.

It isn't foolproof but it does reduce the calls a bit.

I haven't tried this yet but there is also an Email Preference Service to, which is another weapon against spam.

Trading Standards are the place to go if your life continues to be hounded by unsolicited calls, post or emails.

Plastic bag free day - 28th March 2008

The Norwich Carbon Reduction Trust, known also as CRed, is running a series of events over the year with a Plastic Bag Free Day in Norwich on 28th March.

On 28th March, if you are shopping in Norwich, or indeed wherever you are on that day, why not ask yourself, "Do I need another plastic bag?".

According to CRed, most plastic bags have on average a lifespan of 12 minutes and yet take over 400 years to degrade in landfill sites!

Each year in the UK, 13 billion plastic bags used in a year in the United Kingdom.

Norfolk is taking a lead on this issue. Already the market town of Aylsham is trying to become the first plastic bag free town in Norfolk.

So join the people of Norwich - both traders and shoppers – and support the Norwich Carbon Reduction Trust in saying no to plastic bags on Friday 28th March – make that the day you start to use a bag for life and prolong the life of the earth.

If you want to take this further and get better at managing the waste you produce at home and recycle more, why not get inspiration from Almost Mrs Average at The Rubbish Diet?

Future of waste in Norfolk - have your say

Norfolk County Council is inviting residents of the county to have their say on the future of how household waste is managed in the county.

You can complete the questionnaire online , or download it, or request it by email.

The deadline for completed questionnaires is 11th April 2008.

Visit this link for some useful background and related links to help you decide on what the priorities are.

The annoying and undermining thing for me was that I got a hard copy of this questionnaire about waste management in Norfolk as an insert when I bought a copy of the Eastern Daily Press newspaper today, which was wrapped in clear plastic just to emphasise that it was on sale for 25p today.

Big thumbs down to the EDP for being rubbish by creating unnecessary rubbish with this needless packaging!

Prime Minister Brown and the Bags of Doom

Got an email to say that Number 10 has responded to the online petition to put a tax on plastic carrier bags.

You can read the Number 10 response here. The original petition "Introduce a tax on plastic carrier bags" was signed by 1,964 people when it closed on 28th February. May not seem a lot but it does at least give you hope that a few like minded people with a worthy cause are occasionally listened to by the government.

Hopefully we will soon stop seeing these bags flapping around in trees and discarded on our streets and countryside. We shouldn't wait for the government to act though, and keep on leading by example by reusing bags, refusing new ones at supermarkets if they try to pack for you, or using non-plastic ones.

Garden waste scheme to be extended across Norwich

Norwich City Council launched a brown bin pilot scheme last April. For £35, residents of Eaton and Crome wards could buy this service for fortnightly doorstep collection of gardening waste.

It has been a great success with 1,700 households signing up, and more than 400 tonnes of garden waste collected in its forst six months.

As a result, the scheme will now be made available to all residents within the Norwich City Council's area.

This is great news and I have even seen at the Waste Disposal area/Dump at Kettingham that you can purchase compost. I guess that this will be an output from some of this garden waste?

We'll certainly be renewing this service.

You can download a leaflet about the scheme or visit the Garden Waste Recycling section of the Norwich City Council web site for more details.

Have a Green Start the New Year - Recycle your Christmas Cards

Happy New Year !

Why not support the Woodland Trust and Recycle Now's joint campaign and recycle all those Christmas Cards you might have received this Christmas? Apparently we sent about 100 million!

Various retail chains have tubs for you to post your cards including, Marks & Spencer, TK Max, Tesco, and WH Smith's.

The campaign runs from 2-31 January 2008 and more details can be found on the Woodland Trust's web site.

Got the blues - at least once a fortnight

We got a blue bin this week.

We can now recycle more stuff in Norwich, although like my previous post, no shredded paper is permitted.

I'll still rely on the worms in the wormery and compost bin for this.

Even though I am pleased about this, it is going to be a big culture change as we are also switching to fortnightly rubbish collection.

Well done to the city council as they have us a calendar for the year. Must make sure that I remember to look at it!

Blogging this from my mobile so I hope there aren't too many spelling mistakes.

Ultimate protection against identity fraud - get a wormery!

Last year my family bought me a Can-O-Worms wormery as a birthday present.

It came from Wiggly Wigglers and not only gives you a good way of managing your fruit and veg waste but also gives you some low maintenance pets!

With the increasing concerns about identity fraud and the advice being that we should shred all paperwork before chucking it out/recycling it.

This has been discussed on the BBC site as well and the refusal of some local authorities to collect shredded paper waste has been raised because of damage caused to the vehicles collecting it.

Like in this article on The Register, I've discovered that this more sensitive paperwork, like bank statements, gets dealt with really well by my worms.

Why not put some of your shredded till receipts or bank statements into a wormery or compost bin with your fruit and veg scraps?

Protect your personal data today!

Get a compost bin and a wormery. :-)

Photography and environmental footprints - how big are yours?

If you are interested in photography, have any Pentax kit, and are interested in green issues, you might have come across this excellent Pentax blog called OK1000.

I am keen on digital photography and have an old 3Meg Canon Powershot A70 and some Pentax SLR gear, including my prized ME Super that my father-in-law kindly gave me some years back.

It is easy to assume that going digital would mean that a consumer's impacts on the environment would reduce and would therefore be a good thing. No more chemicals in the dark room etc.

The scale of the pollution and harm linked to the manufacture of film has been highlighted on Leo Hickman's blog, with Kodak being the focus. Thankfully, their switch to digital has demonstrated a massive reduction in the amount of pollution they generate.

Digital has not done away with coated paper usage though. The cameras themselves with their LCD screens and funky features eat battery power. With all those digital images taken, there is an increased demand for more storage online or on huge hard disks. The manipulation of images demand higher spec power-hungry PCs or MACs. Then there are the costs and impacts associated with home, online or high street printing services. The solid-state memory cards are a product from the semi-conductor industry, itself making use of highly toxic chemicals.

Digital photo frames sold in their thousands last Christmas - they use electricity and all these digital gadgets can cause harm in their production and improper disposal.

One things is clear. The marketeers try to convince that we must have the latest, digital whizzy megapixel-beast or our photographs will be pants.

Why?

I'm still using my 3 megapixel Canon A70 and Pentax SLR gear and to be honest, a new camera would distract me from getting used to the equipment I have and practicising to improve my photography skills. Sure, I would like a digital SLR (so long as I can still use my existing Pentax lenses with it) but I would not chuck out the kit I have now. There is always eBay, Freecycle, or charity shops where you can recycle your unwanted stuff.

I'm not sure that digital has a smaller environment footprint than than traditional photography but it is clear that consumer behaviour can make things better.

It isn't all doom and gloom and I would urge all digital photographers to read this excellent post OK1000 Pentax Blog: Considering Green Digital Photography.

Organic milk at any price?

Hi.

This is my first attempt at blogging and I would like to get your help. Like a lot of people in the UK, our family is trying to make ends meet and we want to make sure we live as healthily, ethically and sustainably as we can.

In this blog, I would like your help in cutting through the unhelpful hype or misguided stuff on ethical and sustainable living, sometimes called the "greenwash".

It seems to me that the choices of what to do, what to buy are numerous and not straightforward. A recent example for us is whether to have organic milk delivered or regular milk. We have a toddler and the motivation to buy organic milk is strong.

We found out that the organic milk is supplied in tetra paks rather than glass bottles. Healthwise, there seems to be a strong consensus on the benefits of organic milk but buying the milk in this type of packaging concerns us.

In Norfolk there is a scheme to recycle tetra paks. When I contacted the City Council in Norwich, I was told that the pilots were successful, with 5.15 tonnes of waste not being added to landfill between February 2006 and April 2007. The scheme is available in my area and 5 out of 18 sites in Norfolk now recycle this type of waste.

My concern is that the tetra paks are recycled at a facility outside the UK (Norway I think?), and may involve transportation to a mill in Fife, Scotland before they are shipped overseas.

Is all this effort to avoid adding the waste to landfill and paying more landfill tax worth it? The transportation and processing costs, as well as the CO2 generated cannot be helping matters.

It is difficult to know what to do for the best. I have seen a bit of a debate on this in the It's Not Easy Being Green Forum and in a post on the How To Be Green blog, and certainly Tetra Pak promote themselves as being very environmentally responsible and espouse the benefits of their packaging.

We would like to buy organic milk and have it delivered to our doorstep but not if the costs are too high.

What would you do or what do you think?