The Times 10 Eco Blogs For Earth Day List

Life Goggles is delighted to be named on the Times 10 eco blogs for Earth Day list. The Times is a major newspaper in the UK, based in London, and listed the following eco blogs:

• No Impact Man
• The Daily Green
• Conscious Consuming
• Inhabitat
• The Alternative Consumer
• Life Goggles - That’s us!
• La Marguerite
• Ecology and Policy
• Globalisation and the Environment
• Climate Progress

Congrats to all the other excellent blogs too!

Green Link Love - Other Great Green Sites 2

After my first Green Link Love post I received a few emails, two of which stood out. One asking “What is link love?” - it’s simply linking out to other sites that might be of interest to your readers. The “love” part is because it helps the other website as you provide a link and, if done correctly, can help them in their search engine rankings. This isn’t the reason for doing it of course, but it can help.

The second interesting email was asking whether it was a good idea to link out to competing websites. The way I see it is other green sites are not competition for us. If one person can make a difference by recycling or making an effort to be environmentally responsible and sustainable then they are part of a wider community that are helping make the world a better place. A website is the same, no matter how large or small, that site can make a difference and is part of a community. One that we’re proud to be part of. That said, let’s move on….

As before, for more fun green things on the web, see Adam’s increasingly popular Fun Green Roundups.

First up is the wonderfully named WEEE Man that is a depiction of a human made up of the average amount of electronic waste a UK citizen would use in their lifetime. The WEEE refers to European legislation called the Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment directive. Full of tips, it’s worth taking a look at.

The ever expanding Green Options has turned one year old. To celebrate, the excellent Sustainablog will be featuring one of our posts every week from now on.

David runs The Good Human, a site that encourages people to be better humans, whether through working to clean up the environment, being active in political issues that mean a lot to you or just being more aware of your life and surroundings. Some great stuff on there, such as 30 uses for a dead tree, and I like the 10% discount on Simple Shoes he currently has at the moment until March 31st.

The National Geographic Intelligent Travel blog is always good value, like the world’s first solar city. Actually Marilyn sent me a link to a stunning article about how your electronic trash is sometimes shipped out to places like Ghana where adults and children melt them down to sell the often toxic metals inside. Fascinating and frightening.

There are a few websites for “green” jobs, though the market is still relatively new and there is yet a definition of what a green job actually is. If you want a job that matters, one place to look is Jobs That Matter. If you’ve tried them, let me know.

G2bgreen has a green to-do list. The tips are pretty unorganized and it is a long list, but there is some gold in there. And while on the subject, they have a list of places to go for green jobs.

Fancy some eco art? Eco Artware creates gifts from recycled , reused and natural materials. If coasters made from re-used metal traffic signs, or a bottle opener made from an old bike chain sound good to you, then take a look. Life Goggles will be reviewing some of their products over the next few months (i.e. when I buy something from there for my wife’s birthday!).

Cool Green Gadgets does exactly what it says on the tin, looks at cool green gadgets.

Finally a question for you - http://www.localcooling.com/ - Has anyone tried it or heard of it?

Well that’s it for this time. Any comments, please post them below - was this too long, too short? Needs more pictures? Would be better as an audio or video post? Just let me know!

If you want to be featured here, drop me a line and we’ll take a look.

Green Link Love - Other Great Green Sites

It’s been a while since I last did a list of some interesting green sites, Adam’s fun green roundups take care of that mostly, however there are some more that I wanted to mention. Some of these have come from reader suggestions, so if you have any please let me know, others I found via the excellent StumbleUpon.

Climate Discussion

Climate Counts is a non-profit organisation that discusses climate change, and has some interesting info on what various companies are doing using their review scorecard.

If video is your thing, The Manpollo Project is a series of videos (45 and counting) discussing climate change. I recommend watching at least the first one to see if it’s for you, it’s actually very well done (argument wise!).

Taking Action

The Big Green Idea has been set up to provide investment in community-based environmental projects in the UK. They have a lot of downloadable factsheets on everything from baking your own bread to building a solar dryer.

Do The Green Thing is a community that tries to make it easy and enjoyable to be a bit greener. Every month they give you a a different Green Thing to do, for example January’s is “Take the stairs”. It seems pretty interesting in spirit but is a little confusing in execution (though that could just be me…).

A sort of green X-Prize, The Big Green Challenge is a competition with a £1 million prize fund to come up with new approaches that will lead to a 60% reduction of CO2 emissions in your local community.

Another site beginning with “eco”… (I’d be surprised if there are any domain names left with eco at the start), if you’ve already calculated your carbon footprint, you can also work out your ecological footprint at Ecofoot. It’s US-biased, and some questions are tricky (”How much of the food that you eat is processed, packaged and not locally grown (from more than 200 miles away)?”) but it’s worth taking a look.

Shopping

If you’re in New Zealand, then EcoPeople is a social enterprise business that sells natural products. It operates as a charitable trust that tries to increase employment opportunities for people with experience of mental illness.

If organic gardens are your thing, then an instant organic garden from Rocket Gardens in the UK might be your thing. It’s a box full of baby organic vegetable and herb plants packed in straw. All you have to do is plant them.

At home

How can I recycle this? is a cool English blog that answers your questions on how to recycle certain products. e.g. How do I recycle an old snowboard? Suggestion: use it as a funky shelf?

Previously we’ve talked about search engines that donate to charity and carbon neutral search, well FriendsGreen is a search engine that “fights global warming”. The money they make from you using their custom Google search engine goes to a variety of projects such as the Adopt An Acre Program of the Nature Conservancy.

Let us know if you find any great links

Swap clothes online with Swango.com

In a nutshell Swango.com describes itself as the coolest place online to swap clothes and “swapping as easy as shopping”. Sort of an eBay but for swapping clothes, Swango puts a 21st century slant on going round to your friend’s house and rummaging through their clothes. And we all know it’s greener to reuse than buy new.

At the moment just based in the US, Swango differs from other sites by being cheap and also allowing buying and sellers to share the cost of shipping. To find out a bit more and where the ’swapping’ actually comes into it, Life Goggles spoke to Swango’s Matt Poulton.

LG: Tell us about Swango and how you became involved in it?
Matt: I have been involved with Swango since the inception of the idea. Along with others at Swango, I helped research and develop the business model behind it.

Most of us have lightly-worn, in-style clothing and shoes in our closets that we’ve lost interest in wearing (or that we’re still wearing, but not enjoying!). What if you could remix your wardrobe with a fresh set of stylish, brand name clothing for only a fraction of what it would cost new?

Swango allows people from across the country to swap their clothing with other Swango members, while paying next to nothing in the process. A small per-item fee of $.99 (plus co-shipping) is all you’ll pay on this ever-changing, real-time online clothing swap. Swango more closely mimics a real-life clothing swap than any other online swap site since it allows users to swap multiple items with multiple members and check out just one time.

Would you describe it as an environmentally friendly company?
Yes. Obviously, we cannot avoid the consequences that a company that relies on the transportation of goods has on the environment. We do not overlook that or try to skirt around the issue, but we strongly believe that swapping clothing on a large scale can help in the battle against fast fashion and needless consumer textile waste caused by the disposal of perfectly good and wearable clothing.

There are other swap sites and you can sell clothes on eBay and other sites - what makes Swango different?
Although these are great sites, we offer a different solution to revitalize your wardrobe. Without spending all your cash or increasing your credit card balance shopping for clothes, let somebody else give your clothes a try and grab some new clothes for a great price from like-minded people around the country.

You have a unique shipping/postage scheme - tell us about that?
Swango uses a co-shipping approach to relieve the buyer and seller of unnecessary shipping negotiations and to maintain a consistent experience for Swango members. Since peer-to-peer swapping is more co-op than an e-commerce in nature, it seems appropriate for both parties to contribute toward the cost of shipping.

With co-shipping, the buyer pays a flat rate of $1.00 per item for baby and children clothes and accessories, and $2.00 per item for junior and adult clothes and shoes. The seller chips in the difference to buy the necessary shipping label. On average, the seller pays about $1.00 to $3.00 per item, depending on how many items the ship in one package.
[Read more]

Carbon Neutral Search Engine

Most of us (according to the latest statistics) use Google to search. In fact, 80% of all visitors which arrive to this site via a search engine, use Google. However if a search engine offered to give you the same results as Google but also offset your search, would you use that instead? That’s the premise behind the Carbon Neutral Search Engine, who have paid for a sponsored review of their service.

The Carbon Neutral Search Engine was developed by a company called fooke limited in the UK, launching in October 2007. Searches made on their Google powered search engine are offset the emissions generated through online search queries. How do they do this? They have calculated (for UK users) that when taking account the energy used by the search engine and by the user’s computer that 17.57g of carbon are emitted. Because this will vary massively by country they offset each search query by a minimum of 300g via offsetters Climate Care and Carbon Fund (see later). The home page shows the exact emissions offset to date.

So what’s it like to use? Well, as you can see it’s all black, I assume as a way to save a tiny bit of power on certain LCD monitors (there’s an LCD Monitor Search link in the top left of the page), and works pretty much exactly the same way as Google does.

So how do they pay for this offsetting? Well the results that are displayed show Google Adwords ads, they same as they would on Google itself. However any clicks on the ads make money on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis for the Carbon Neutral Search Engine, through the program Google Adsense. I have no problem with that, it’s the fundamental basis that most websites make money, but in this case the profits are going towards carbon offsetting schemes rather than to the advertisers.

As you can see above, the Google referral ad (for Google Adsense) is on the large side, with some adverts below it, followed by the same search results you get in Google (I checked!).

As mentioned they use Climate Care and the Carbon Fund to provide their offsetting. According to the site “Climate Care is a leading offsetting organisation in the United Kingdom and through investing in renewable technology, energy efficiency and reforestation has offset a total of 1m tonnes since they were founded in 1998. They continue to grow through partnerships with leading international brands including British Airways, Land Rover and Grant Thornton. Carbon Fund is also a leading US non profit carbon offsetting company, offsetting over 1m tonnes from 400 companies and 100 000 individuals.”

If the search engine is a success, they also also plan to develop small scale renewable energy projects within the UK, which is an honourable goal for any company.

Personally I think it works great, provides the same functionality as Google and it’s simplistic with no pop-ups or crowded with adverts or links to other sites (besides the ones your searching for of course…). Soon they will be launching a browser plugin (both Firefox and Internet Explorer) to increase ease of use, but for now check out the Carbon Neutral Search Engine.

If you would like a review of your site or product please see the advertise page or contact us.

UK’s First Non-Profit Price Comparison Site Launches

We’ve previously talked about donating to charity whilst you search, however you can now donate to charity whilst you compare prices.

NeverGreedy is a non-profit price comparison site that tries to make it simple for consumers to reduce the environmental impact of their online purchases while saving money. When you buy a product (not just search for one) via the NeverGreedy site, retailers pay NeverGreedy a commission. 80% of this is then donated to projects that promote sustainable environments and livelihoods around the world through technology and education.

Currently they have over 1,000 retailers to choose from (in the UK only at the moment), including Amazon, John Lewis, M&S, British Airways, Dell, Apple, HMV and The Body Shop as well as the main UK Gas, Electric, Telephone and Broadband suppliers.

According to themselves, NeverGreedy is:
- An effective yet simple first step in reducing the impact of online shopping.
- Unique in donating 80% of all revenue generated.
- An effective way for consumers to signal to retailers that the environment is important.
- A new way for ethical and eco friendly retailers to promote themselves and their products.

Examples of how NeverGreedy works.
i) A £829 Apple laptop is purchased via NeverGreedy, earning 2.5% or £20.73 in commission.
ii) A person signs up for 12-month contract with BT Broadband via NeverGreedy, earning £30 in commission.
iii) A £79.95 kids toy from John Lewis is purchased via NeverGreedy, earning 5% or £4 in commission.

The final donations for the above examples would be i) £16.58, ii) £24 & iii) £3.20.

This money would then donated to a project that would use the money to conserve land / plant trees (nearly 1 acre could be purchased for the combined total of the above three examples).

If you’ve tried NeverGreedy then why not let us know what you think?

Donate To Charity Whilst You Search

Gavin, over at Green Options has a great article on the top 15 charity search engines.

This is done mainly by providing a portion of the advertising revenue they receive to charity or green projects. The sites he has listed are:

- Goodsearch
- Everyclick
- Searchgive
- Ripple
- Magic Taxi
- Search Kindly
- GoodTree
- Catch Tomorrow
- Lookie
- Rectifi
- Clicks For Cancer
- Charity Café
- Oblatoo
- The Green Spider
- ClicksCount

To find out how each site helps take a look at Green Options for more details. If you know of any others, please add them below.

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