Posts from the “Less Pollution” Category

An evil plot to pollute the world

Posted on June 20, 2019

Let’s imagine we live in a beautiful world without pollution, with plenty of fruit to eat and clean running water in beautiful streams. Everyone is happy in this beautiful place. Now, enter an evil mastermind who wants to ruin everything. What plans could he hatch to pollute the world and ruin it? Well, pretty much what humans have been doing for the last 100 years would work. Sounds like a plot for a 007 movie, and it would be amusing if it didn’t feel so true. The plot to pollute the world The evil mastermind hatched a plot to pollute the world. He wanted to bring the world to an end and have everyone else in the world help him do it without knowing.…

Categories: Climate Change, Less Pollution

Tagged: air travel, environment, forests, meat, plastic, sustainability, trees

Plane Pollution – a huge problem

Posted on May 28, 2019

I was doing some gardening early on Monday. It was a beautiful morning and when I looked up, I was startled to see so many plane trails in the sky. In fact, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and everything I could see was caused by plane pollution. It was really surprising, and got me thinking about what a problem plane pollution is and why we generally just ignore it. This prompted me to investigate a number of articles on the internet (you can see links to all these articles below along with the most interesting quotes from each). It’s clear that plane pollution is one of the major problems we’re facing as humankind, and we need to do something radical and quickly.

Categories: Less Fossil Fuels, Less Pollution

Tagged: air travel, CO2, planes

Ironing – why do we do that?

Posted on May 19, 2019

Have you ever stopped to think why we do ironing? Why do we iron and press our clothes? I’m sure you’re all thinking that it’s because we need to get the wrinkles and creases out. Sure, but why is that important? Why is that we are not acceptable human beings if our clothing isn’t pressed? Surely this is just a symbol of status and it’s quite ridiculous. If we didn’t have to iron and press our clothes, we’d actually be using less of the worlds resources; we wouldn’t be wasting energy (mostly electricity) on heating up irons we wouldn’t have to make irons (mostly made in far away countries, using metals and plastics, then wrapped in plastic and a box and then shipped all…

Categories: Less Pollution, Less Waste

Tagged: sustainability

Soap without plastic

Posted on January 31, 2019

It’s hard to avoid plastic in general in today’s world, and it’s especially hard to find soap without plastic. Somehow, we’ve managed to convince ourselves that soap comes from the factories of large corporations and comes in disposable, plastic, pump-action bottles. That’s crazy! Soap is actually pretty simple stuff and you can definitely buy it without the need for any plastic. We should all really get our soap without plastic pollution as part of the transaction. I’m glad to see that more and more soaps are available in packaging that does not include plastic. It is possible to buy soap without plastic. All that’s needed is for the soap to be wrapped inside some paper and put in a simple cardboard box. Not even…

Categories: Less Pollution, Less Waste

Tagged: packaging, plastic, soap

Recycled Bucket – from tyre rubber

Posted on January 6, 2019

Back in October, I argued that governments should Ban New Plastic because we can’t just keep bringing new plastic into the world until it suffocates. We’ve already made so much plastic that we shouldn’t need any more as we should be able to just recycle what we have. Well, one example of what can be done presented itself to me recently when I bought a recycled bucket made from old car tyres. This bucket was made by Faulks & Cox Ltd under their brand Tyre Rubber and is made from recycled tyre offcuts. Not only has this bucket avoided the need for making new plastic, it really is a very good bucket. It’s the strongest bucket I’ve used (apart from galvanised steel buckets, but…

Categories: Less Pollution, Recycling

Tagged: plastic

Compostable Crisp Packets

Posted on December 26, 2018

We don’t think about crisp packets too often do we? We just enjoy the crisps, without realising that almost all crisp packets are not recyclable and will end up in landfill (or worse!) for a very long time. The good news is that a British company called Two Farmers has come up with a way of creating compostable crisp packets, which is fantastic, and they taste great too! Compostable Crisp Packets It’s amazing that a small start-up company in the UK has been able to beat all the big manufacturers to a compostable crisp packet. Amazing, but understandable. We’ll see later what’s really going on here. On the Two Farmers website, they say this about their compostable crisp packets (I have no affiliation with Two…

Categories: Less Pollution, Less Waste, Recycling

Tagged: packaging, plastic, sustainability

Mobility Lab and Amazon Plastic Packaging

Posted on November 18, 2018

I was completely shocked recently when I ordered a “Mobility Lab” mouse from Amazon and the package arrived with so much plastic packaging. It’s really awful, so unnecessary and none of it recyclable. In this case, Mobility Lab and Amazon plastic packaging is so bad, they should both be ashamed, and governments need to step in and stop such usage of plastic. In the images below you can see that seven independent pieces of plastic were used to package the mouse. Really over the top. Not good Mobility Lab and not good Amazon! I’d purchased the “Mobility Lab ML301884 1600 DPI Wired Optical Mouse for Mac and PC – White” from Amazon. I’m a little disappointed that I bought a new mouse made out…

Categories: Less Pollution, Less Waste, Recycling

Tagged: packaging, plastic, sustainability

Harrogate Spring Water and recycling

Posted on October 31, 2018

I was flying on a short flight in Europe recently and, I’m sorry to say, that I needed some water so I bought one (as you have to do on flights these days) from the flight crew. I know, it’s in a plastic bottle that’s just going to get thrown away (sorry planet!). The bottle I received was from Harrogate Spring Water and I was surprised to learn that it was 50% recycled. This made me feel somewhat better as Harrogate Spring Water was using 50% materials that had already been recycled. That’s great and they need applause for that. If everyone did that it would be a great step forward. However of course, we’d like companies to go even further. Why can’t they…

Categories: Less Pollution, Recycling

Tagged: plastic, sustainability

Ban New Plastic

Posted on October 14, 2018

One of the things that’s worrying me more and more as each day goes by is plastic. It’s everywhere and there are more and more reports on TV (and everywhere) about the huge problems disposed plastic is causing for the world. So, I keep wondering why the world can’t just ban new plastic. That might sound extreme, but it makes plenty of sense to me and it would definitely work. I’m not talking about banning plastic completely, which would be impossible. But what if, from today onwards, all the plastic used by corporations had to be recycled? Plastic is a huge problem I was astonished when I read this article on The Economist – Only 9% of the world’s plastic is recycled. For me, the…

Categories: Less Pollution, Less Waste

Tagged: plastic

Wenlock Spring Water

Posted on September 17, 2018

It’s nice to find good companies, trying to do the right thing for the world occasionally. Recently, I was on a train trip in the UK and bought a bottle of water, and got a pleasant surprise from the company called Wenlock Spring. Generally, I don’t like buying water in a plastic bottle because it’s just adding more waste plastic into the world, but sometimes you just have to (do I really??). In this case, I was glad to see the comments on the bottle from Wenlock Spring (i hope all these comments are for real). The label says they’ve made the plastic for the bottle from 50% recycled plastic. That’s 50% less than I’d like, but 50% more than most plastic bottles. So,…

Categories: Less Pollution, Recycling

Tagged: plastic, water