The Trials Of Being A Fish

The Conserve Our Ocean Legacy campaign is a non-profit, campaign that is an effort to build support for ocean and fish protection in America.

To highlight their campaign they have released an online overfishing game “Ocean Survivor“. It’s designed to draw attention to the perils of overfishing and provide people with an opportunity to sign a petition to make a difference.

Pollution, habitat destruction, mismanagement and overfishing have impoverished ocean resources, and have caused more than 90% of the world’s large fish, including tuna, swordfish and marlin to disappear.

Are You A Green Genuis? Win $5,000!

Planet Smoothie is a maker and retailer of those lovely cold fruit things called smoothies (obviously). They currently use recycled polystyrene cups and containers when giving you gour smoothie in order to keep it cold. However, they’re not happy about it!

They want a solution to what cup to use, so they have asked the public for help. For the individual who comes up with the smartest way to “re-use it or lose it,” Planet Smoothie will reward them with $5,000 and free smoothies for a year.

If you have a great idea and want to enter go here or read more details here. Unfortunately it is only open to US residents and you have to be over 18. And smart Closing isn’t until September 2008, so get your thinking caps on.

Starbucks’s Grounds For Your Garden Program

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, by 2010 worldwide coffee drinkers will drink almost 7 million tonnes of it every year. This means a heck of a lot of spent grounds to dispose of somewhere. Rather than throw the nitrogen-rich material (and acid-rich!) - coffee grounds have a carbon-nitrogen (C-N) ratio of 20-1 - into landfills, global chain Starbucks has found a greener solution by giving it away to consumers with gardens.

Starbucks’s Grounds for Your Garden program actually began as a grassroots initiative back in 1995. After growing steadily for almost a decade, it was officially launched in 2003, offering up free spent coffee grounds to North American customers year-round on a first come, first serve basis. Grounds are packaged in reused coffee bags and sealed with simple directions for using them in the garden or compost pile, where they can help improve soil quality.

“Coffee grounds are a valuable source of nutrition for the garden,” explains Ben Packard, director of environmental affairs for Starbucks. “Reusing coffee grounds in the garden is a great alternative to disposing this rich resource from our stores. It’s a win for gardeners and a win for Starbucks.”

[Via: Springwise]

Disposable Leaf Plates Eco Product Review

Ganesha is an alternative trading outfit that markets the traditional industries of India, working directly with the producers. We’ve more about them in our Paisley Park Jute Shopper Product Review.

The sent Life Goggles a pack of 20 leaf plates to test. But where do you start testing a plate? Kev did an excellent review of some plates made from potato starch so I did what any self-respecting blogger would do and thought I’d copy him.

But as it turns out, these are quite different products. These disposable plates are made from sal and siali leaves, from the forests of Orissa, east India. And as you’d expect, leaves can’t hold that much weight so doing a test like Kev’s weight bearing experiment with apples was a no goer, in fact it struggles with a knife and fork on it. For an easy comparison, think of the leaf plates as a replacement for paper plates at parties or barbecues. But bigger. They’re about 30cm (12″) in diameter.

So how do they fare? Pretty well to be honest, they’re used in India for festivals and weddings and you can see why. They’re flexible and you can hold it with one hand to squeeze it together a little to keep things secure, however your hand needs to be underneath as it will just bend if you hold it by the edge with something heavy on it.

As I said, it’s ideal for snack food, not something to eat your dinner off at the table. A knife will cut through the leaves so a spoon or a fork would be better. The shiny side of the leaves face up (the underside is quite soft) so it does hold liquid to a degree. Things like tomato ketchup are fine, but it won’t hold a thin sauce for long. I tested it using water and while to look at the plate seemed to be holding the water well, moving the plate revealed after a couple of minutes the water had seeped through.

While I was at it, I thought I’d see if they were reusable after a quick wash. Not really. A quick wipe maybe, but once the leaves are wet, they tend to curl up when drying which splits some of the seams and there are a few little pieces of wood which connect leave together, which can come undone in the drying process.

So use them once and then put them in the compost - the ultimate in biodegradable dinnerware.

To see how they’re made, go here for a slide show of leaf plate making and there’s a descriptinon too: “Leaf plate making is a village-based industry, which depends upon the local availability of siali (Bauhinia spp.) and sal (Shorea robusta) leaves from nearby forest. It is a widespread activity in the villages of Orissa, employing thousands of workers. Many of them are home-workers working in an informal way, to increase the household income. There are also some more organised ’self-help’ groups. These are often women-focused or adivasi (tribal)-focused.

“Women appear to be the main collectors of leaves. Later, they sit together in the smoothed mud yards in their village and stitch the leaves into rounds with little sticks. They can be stitched further by machine. The stitched rounds are put out in the sun to dry. Each plate is made by pressing two rounds of leaves together in a machine. This work is done mainly by men.”

Local Produce Only Retailers

The wonderfully named UK grocer, Sussex and the City, sells staples such as jams, nuts and biscuits, along with beer and wine. The point of difference: all the wares are produced within 50 miles of Sussex and the City’s location in Brighton.

Thus customers aren’t simply stocking their pantry shelves, they’re demonstrating some healthy local pride, and getting guaranteed freshly delivered foods in the process. Equally important, Sussex and the City’s customers help support small-scale local food producers.

The store’s founder, Duncan Innes, previously had been the general manager of the environmentally intelligent Japanese restaurant Moshi Moshi, a role that acquainted him with quality suppliers in the area.

Another store in New York (Williamsburg, Brooklyn) called Urban Rustic, is a grocery store and café that mostly sells food and dry goods produced less than 100 miles away from the store. Anything from farther afield will be sourced from sustainable sources.

[Via: Springwise]

Fairtrade Fortnight

Fairtrade Fortnight starts on 25th Feb and lasts until the 9th March this year. One company, Cafédirect, is launching a new rich full-bodied coffee from the very best Costa Rican coffee beans, called Special Selection Costa Rica - a premium, 100% Fairtrade, instant coffee.

I’m, not a coffee drinker, but chances are a lot of you are. Apparently Special Selection is a new seasonal line in instant coffee that follows the different coffee harvests around the world, capturing the beans at their prime. Once Special Selection coffee beans are picked, “they are carefully hand selected by Cafédirect’s growers to create a coffee that is both unique in character and taste”.

Cafédirect is a company we’ve mentioned many times, firstly I used to work by their offices, but more importantly they pay fair prices for its crops, so you can rest assured that while you enjoy your cuppa, you also contribute to improving the quality of life for growers in developing countries. In addition Cafédirect reinvests its profits into tailor-made training and development programmes, working directly with its growers to develop their expertise.

You can pick up a 100g jar of Special Selection Costa Rica from Oxfam stores in the UK, for around £3.25.

Green Cooking News

BBC Good Food magazine has lots of good “green” food and kitchen news and advice.

Innocent drinks have been trying to work out the carbon footprint of their (admittedly delicious) smoothies. In collaboration with the Carbon Trust and the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management, Innocent have found that transporting it’s Mango and Passion Fruit smoothie resultd in relatively low emissions but creating the packaging caused much higher emissions.

Kitchen gadgets can obviously be a major source of energy consumptiopn, but some are more efficient than others. The following examples all use one unit of electricity:
- Mixing a cake a week in a mixer for one year.
- Cooking 1.3kg of chips in a deep-fat fryer.
- Blending over 400 litres of soup.
- Grinding over 90kg of coffee in a coffee mill.
- Boiling 6.8 litres (12 pints) of water in a kettle.

Over 6.7m tonnes of food waste is generated by households each year (costing around £250-£400) and around 50% of this is still edible. A few tips to reduce your food waste:

• Plan meals ahead so you don’t buy food that you won’t use.
• Use-by dates are a huge reason for waste so try to plan ahead.
• Don’t buy too much at once, just because you’re in the store. You can always go back again int he (unlikely) event you need more.
• Set your fridge to be between 1 and 5C so food keeps as best it can.
• Use leftovers creatively or better still, don’t make too much in the first place.
• Compost as much leftovers and scraps as you can.

[Via: BBC Good Food]

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