Feeding the 5,000

How come we've missed that?! In January in an attempt to highlight the staggering amounts of waste generated in the UK's good chain, author Tristram Stuart offered free lunches to central London made of food that would otherwise have ended up in the bin...

From Consumerism to Sustainability

The Worldwatch Institute has a new report, 'State of the World 2010: Transforming Cultures,' that may be of interest to some of you currently researching consumerism. The core focus of the report is on shifts from consumerism to sustainability. Free chapters of select sections are available to download here.

Ecosia: The eco-friendly search engine

Ecosia is a environmental-friendly search engine that saves the rainforest while your're searching the web. At least 80% of their search income goes to a rainforest protection program run by WWF, which uses this money for the sustainable protection of rainforests in the Juruena National Park in Brazil.

It saves 2m² of rainforest with each web search you do. Their search results are as good as Google or Yahoo. So far (28.1.2010) Ecosia has saved 18,795,321 m² (22,479,204 yd²) of rainforest. They're not running any servers powered by alternative energy yet though. None the less I suggest you make it your browser's default start page!

Eco life style

In December I went around in Brick lane and there was a ECO fair.
Here are some of the product I saw..

ECO Nuts for your laundry

It is made from the sun dried fruit of the Sapindus Mukorossi tree and its Fair Trade. The shells of these nuts contain saponin, a natural detergent, which gets sudsy in water. Since Eco Nuts doesn’t leave any residue, you can actually skip the rinse cycle and save gallons of water, energy and money. As you can see its sell in recycle packag The seller said those shells is odorless and foamless, you can use it over times till the shell dissolve totally. I didn't buy them as I still have half box of family pack of washing powder.

Moroccan Rhassoul Clay wash for hair and body

It has a powerful negative charge and acts as a detoxifying agent. It come as power and you just need to add water before use.
Its 100% pure clay minerals and full biodegradable.
I bought that for 5pounds 100g and I am using it as facial wash and its better then what I except.

Natural Deodorant

Its the raw natural look crystal like deodorant which made from alum mineral salts.
Non-aerosol, no Aluminum Chlorhydrate, non-staining unisex formula and not tested on animals.

Also...

Recycle Knitting Kit

Its using those normal supermarket plastic bags and cut them into a long strip and use those strips instead of wool.

Green Brochures

Brochures or pamphlets are commonly used for advertising events, places, hotels, products, services, etc. This is surely informative for people to get more information but the problems about paper brochures are they are produced in mass quantities and a lot of excess waste is generated. This certainly has an impact to the environment and to tackle this problem, Save Our Trees, a non profit international environment project is promoting the use of digital green brochures to reduce paper consumption. They also provide a free conversion from printed brochures into a 3D page digital format.

An example of digital green brochure,
http://www.tourismbrochures.net/businessbrochures/sidi_saler/index.htm

This is certainly a good way to make deforestation lesser where from the statistics from this project shows that by converting 240,000 pages of brochures, magazines, manuals and catalogues saves around 700,000 trees per year. TourismBrochures.net portal is also part of this project where the aim of this project is to give out information to tourists before going to the places they wish to travel. They hope to give out the most accurate information and also to reduce printed brochures so that less trees will be cut down for printing purposes.

Daniel Goleman on Ecological Intelligence

Daniel Goleman is a psychologist and the author of the best-selling book Emotional Intelligence. His newest book, Ecological Intelligence, is a look through the haze of the true cost of what we buy. He places a strong emphasis on industrial life cycle assessment, a discipline that blends industrial engineering and chemistry with environmental science and biology — in order to assess how man-made systems impact natural ones.

Listen to the Interview on Treehugger Radio:

In the interview Goleman mentions goodguide.com a website which claims to "help you find better products that represent your values, avoid products that are harmful to your health, the environment, or society – and enable you to take actions to help improve the world."

Here is another talk:

The story of stuff

"From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world."
http://www.storyofstuff.com/

See also the reading recommendations and fact sheets under the "resources" section of this site.