You probably didn’t hear about it, but in 2008 Estonia cleaned up 10,000 tons of trash in their forests by recruiting 50,000 people. How? Through an extensive media campaign and a good dose of networked collaboration.
The “Let’s Do It!” website is here, but in Estonian. So here’s a video in English!
Based on the success in Estonia, the campaign has gone worldwide!
Living and not producing any waste is pretty impressive. A family in the UK set out to demonstrate that they can easily live life and only make a trashcan’s worth of rubbish in a year. Guess what? They did it.
“Our vision is for a zero waste UK; a country where we rethink our rubbish and start to view it as a resource rather than a waste product,†the Strausses write on their website, MyZeroWaste. “Our belief is that a zero waste Britain is possible if more energy, money and care is put into education, innovative product design and recycling facilities.â€
OK, so that’s the why. But what about the how? How does a three-person household cuts its trash footprint so dramatically while still keeping up a typical British living standard?
The Strausses go into great detail on their website. Step one, obviously: Reduce, for which they recommend everything from buying in bulk to simply removing the kitchen bin (“The out of sight out of mind approach … “). Step two: Reuse (turning used coffee grounds into snail and slug repellant, taking their own food containers to the butcher’s shop, wrapping gifts with junk mail). Step three: Recycle (even sending their empty crisp packets to a Philippine charity that turns them into wallets, bags and purses).
Some research that was released late last year found that people in the UK really like caring for the environment with recycling being the most popular green practice.
Green behaviours costing the least money and effort are currently the most popular with the British public, despite the fact that 59 per cent of people think that if things continue on their current course we will soon experience a major environmental disaster.
A fuller picture of environmental and other behaviours and attitudes based on the first annual survey of 100,000 individuals from 40,000 households for Understanding Society will be published at a later date.
Happy New Year! To celebrate 2010, I got you a website that makes it easy to find out which cosmetic / toiletry / household good companies don’t test their products on animals.
Here’s the site, and here’s why:
In cosmetics and household products research, painful experiments are carried out on hundreds of thousands of animals every year in the UK, including dogs, rabbits, pigs, mice, rats, guinea-pigs, fish and birds. This includes tests for skin or eye irritation, skin sensitisation (allergy), toxicity (poisoning), mutagenicity (genetic damage), teratogencity (birth defects), carcinogenicity (causing cancer), embryonic or fetal genetic damage and toxicokinetics (to study the absorption, metabolism, distribution and excretion of the substance).
Every year is a good year for ethical consumerism!
It’s the giving time of year, and MobHappy has a short writeup on new technology that allows people to donate to charities, simply by sending a text. This is a great advancement, because it shortens the gap between intention and action where a lot of charitable dollars are lost.
Today, mGive works with over 200 charities, enabling mobile users to donate money quickly and easily via shortcode. And it’s been successful: one campaign, featuring Alicia Keys and conducted during the American Idol TV show saw 90,000 donors raise $450,000 in just minutes. Donors have given about $1.5 million via mobile so far in the US; this exceeds the first year of online donations, and those now amount to some $18 billion per year.
Unfortunately the service is currently only available to our US friends.