Freegans

I was introduced to world of Freegans last week. I had never heard of them before and thought my boyfriend was joking. But I googled it and he was right. Freegans really do exist. Clicking onto a Freegan's website I started my research into this lifestyle. At first glance I was excited by what I saw, my mind running ahead of myself and thinking about my new life as a Freegan. But as I read on I started to become a little disillusioned and annoyed. I can fully understand and support the belief that we shouldn't throw away all the food assigned as past its sell-by-date by supermarkets. Sell-by-dates are not very accurate and a lot of food can continue to be safely edible well past this date. Honey for example is fine for years after the suggested shelf life. I understand the supermarkets need to put an early date on to avoid being sued and accused of selling gone off food but for many food items I say we should use our own judgement. How seriously ill are we going to get by eating cereal that is a month out of date? To prove this point my parents and I ate a bag of crisps that went off over 4 months ago last weekend. We are all still standing. The crisps didn't even taste any different.
A big offender in food waste is holidays and seasonal themed packaging. Food that has been packaged according to what holiday it is tediously linked to will be chucked away when the holiday has passed regardless of the shelf life of whats inside. The same goes for competitions and deals. Once the competition has ended, rather than repackage in a new wrapping, the whole lot gets thrown away.
So Freegans find this food in bins outside shops and eat it. To discourage them the shops often pour bleach or dye over the food to make it inedible. Seems like a waste of time and effort. The website has a FAQ page which covers the issue of legality. Are you allowed to dip into bins and take what you want? If someone has thrown it away they have cut all ties with it, they have dropped ownership of it. If you do not want something, you put it in the bin. But these bins are on someone else's property so you can face charges of trespassing. They comment on the irony of shop managers shouting 'Stop stealing our rubbish!'
Why don't they give this food to the poor? A question I always asked. The practicality and costs of doing this would not be beneficial to the shops. This would probably open up some tricky legal issue of giving supposedly 'out of date' food to homeless people and the possible consequences. Also, why should the poor get second best? But something is better than nothing.
So this was all fine and good. We shouldn't throw away so much food, sell-by-dates shouldn't be so strictly imposed. I agree with all this. However the tone of the website was aggressive and fighting back at me over issues I hadn't raised, comments I hadn't made. As I read on I started to realise that Freegans weren't just about eating free food found in bins, they believe that the world doesn't need money. We should be helping each other in the ways that we can and get help back in return. Our communities should run on skills shared, not what we can pay for. This notion is nice, but impractical. Sure, it would be great if the world wasn't run on money, if people could get what they needed without paying for it. Wouldn't the world be a much pleasanter place without the love of money? But this is never going to happen. Suddenly the focus shifted to this fight, the fight to not need money, to share what we have. In my mind this reduces the credibility of Freeganism drastically. I can see people fighting to reduce food wastage, the demand that the food that supermarkets do throw out goes to the poor, or even to those who don't mind eating 'out of date' food. But people aren't going to make any noise about living in a world without money because they know it is unrealistic. It has ruined what could be a great push forward to reduce waste and reduce costs into something deemed 'hippyish and backward'.
Needless to say, my excitement about Freegans ended there.

The new generation of city farms

On Friday my boyfriend, one of my best friends and I went to visit FARM:shop; a new Green business venture just steps from Dalston Junction.  Not yet fully ready and open, it is hoping to be standing firm by the new year. Open for talks at 1pm on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, we braved the miserable weather and were warmly welcomed in for a 45 minute tour around the premises, learning how to grow food in a small city building.

Something & Son, an Eco-social design practice have created this venture with the idea to producing as much food as possible in a small, abandoned shop in East London. Their business plan? They admitted to not really having one. With no gardening or growing experience they have been joining forces with experts to learn, produce and experiment. Teamed with a farm 30 miles away in Stevenage that houses the tougher, easier to transport veg such as potatoes and the larger farmyard herds, they are aiming to produce enough food to supply to local cafes, restaurants and residents. In December they hope to have their on-site cafe open serving 'see-thru' food. Not a clever, Emperor's new clothes trick, 'see-thru' food is made from the produce growing on the walls around you in the cafe. You can see how and where it's grown and makes such a clear journey from seed to plate that the designers are confident even children need no explanation as to where their food came from, it is all around them.

So to the food itself. As the shop is still very new the plants were sat the seedling stage but the vision for the coming months made itself very clear. The first room houses the hydroponic/aquaponic system. The science of which baffled me slightly from time to time and therefore I apologise if my explanation is not 100% accurate. So from my 'B' grade GCSE science understanding, here is how it works. It starts with two huge fish tanks, currently housing two fish. In a few weeks time these will be filled with 160 fish happily weeing and pooing to the joy of the surrounding plants. The nutrients from the fishes waste gets filtered out the tank and along into the trays of plants adorning the walls. The plants suck up what they need and deposit what they don't - which in perfect fish-plant balance, is exactly what the fish like. Its a big, happy cycle of nutrient sharing.

Fish tank on the left, fish-loving plants on the right

Soon to be planted and gently cascaded with nutrient water, back-lit with some clever plant-loving lighting.

The next room in will be the cafe/library/seedling room. Again the walls are stacked with tray after tray of tiny, trembling plants and a menagerie of small plastic farmyard animals. Working with Phillips, Something & Son are trialling new LEDs lights in a disco mix of blue and red which apparently is the best light for fruiting.

 Stepping outside we duck out of the rain and into the polytunnel hand crafted by volunteers. Raised beds and a wheeled table-cum-plant bed fill the space. All easily removable so that this extra space can be hired out to raise funds for the project.

Rubbish photograph taken from the cafe looking out onto the polytunnel

Heading back inside and up the stairs, past a wall of plants, we are confronted by a room that has, on first appearances, meshed sci-fi and farming in one very warm and bright room. There are shiny pipes and bright orange lights, plugs and probes and wires. The walls are lined with metal sheeting and water is dripping systematically into plants in every available space. There is a fan that sucks out any air infection and other large, metal boxes attached to the walls that did equally sophisticated tasks. Whilst not being the most eco-friendly room in the house (although the heat produced it channeled in other rooms and eventually the polytunnel through the big foil pipes), it is being examined and experimented with to calculate the productivity of the plants within. A bit of extra energy here to replace the food miles of non-city farmed food could even out quite nicely.

Then onto the final room, the meeting room. Complete with table made from two old doors; door number and lock included. Under the table, with the flick of a James Bond, under-table light switch, seeds are placed to germinate. The handy glass panel in the door/table makes for easy viewing of the baby plants.

Table/door with germinating light on.

At one end of the room a wall of basil plants are growing on a slight zigzag-ed frame with water continuously flowing past their roots. A handy plastic water bottle stops the bottom from spurting everywhere.

Basil wall

Dark photo with a hint of the plastic bottle water controller.

A quick glance out the window shows....a roof-top chicken coop with four happy, egg laying hens clucking about and ruffling their feathers at the passing buses. The boys have thought of everything. Soon every available space will be sprouting and laying and producing.

To reach the chickens you must climb through the window 

"But I live in the city and I already grow my own veg' I hear you cry. 'I have loads of tomatoes. They're coming out my ears! All I eat is tomatoes and I still have more growing!" FARM:shop will sell your extra home-growns on for you.
"I'm trying to grow my own but my cucumbers grow round and my peppers keep shriveling up and dying." Help is at hand! What Sam, Paul and Andrew have learnt they want to pass on to fellow city-gardeners.

This is essentially an experiment into city farming. Can they grow food in an old shop? Can they grow enough to achieve their aim and supply the local area?  Does fish poo really make lettuce taste better? Well they have a years free rent to find out. Set up as part of Hackney Council's initiative to transform the disused shops into new, positive spaces, they have a year to become a sustainable business, in every sense of the word.

Quieter crisps please

I just found an article about Walkers reducing their carbon footprint by making their bags from recycled potato peelings. What a fantastic idea! And when I read that they make 10 million bags of crisps every day I was even more impressed by this huge step in the right direction. Reading a little more about this story I realised that this has already been tried by Frito-Lay, another crisp company who produced 100% biodegradable bags. Perfect! Except that people complained they were too loud! Too loud?! You're only eating crisps! Does sound affect your taste buds? Will it diminish your enjoyment of the crisps? I cannot believe that thanks to a 45,000 strong facebook group, entitled 'SORRY BUT I CANT HEAR YOU OVER THIS SUNCHIPS BAG' Frito-Lay took this green packet off the market.
Apparently Walkers new version will be quieter. Well, thank goodness for that!

Recyled Home

On one of the several trains I got from home to London this week I picked up the Sunday Times and read about a family in Bath who decided, rather than go through the cost and hassle of knocking down their structurally fine but badly designed house, they would restyle and recycle it instead. A slightly more drastic task than just a new lick of paint and some jazzy new cushions, they used the bones of the house to build a better designed and more personal home. This money saving plan has the added bonus of being much more environmentally friendly with less manufacture of building materials that would be required for a completely newly built house.

And to look at, the house bears no resemblance to the old, plain, suburban home. In its place stands glass, steel and concrete sculpted into a modern new building. Not only is this new home better looking, it is also more eco-friendly. Pulling the house back to its skeleton allowed the owners to rebuild with the environment in mind; fixing heat and energy leaking areas to produce a much more energy efficient home. Re-planning the layout means better use of natural light resulting in lower usage of electricity.

With so many of Britain's homes being such badly insulated, energy losing messes this could be the way forward. Don't just move house and leave your pathetic home to be inhabited by another family throwing money out the cold windows and pushing it through the draughts under the doors. Be a good world citizen and fix what you have. And in the process you're allowed to make it that little bit special and just that bit more You. And all for less money and less guilt. The perfect, green, home sweet home.

Shweeb!

Forget Boris Bikes, I want to pedal to work in one of these!

Shweeb. Image from www.shweeb.co.nz

The Shweeb is an environmentally friendly, cost efficient merge of the monorail and cycling. Imagine cycling to work in a glass pod high above the traffic jams and dirty streets. And its even inbuilt with a little booster if you're tackling a slight uphill climb. Who wants to ride a boring bike, dodging cars and iPod-ed pedestrians when your alternative is lying back and casually pedalling through the sky?

Chosen by Google Inc as part of Project 10^100 for 'Drive Innovation in Public Transportation', Shweeb has gone on to get $1million from Google to help bring this project to life. And even it if doesnt, I want to go to New Zealand just to have a go!

Recycle those bottles!

I read this great new article today on the BBC website about charging a deposit on bottles with the idea that it will stop people littering, encourage recycling and save the country £160million a year.
If each bottle you buy has a deposit of 15-30p on it then most of us are going to take that bottle back. The more bottles being taken to these special centers means less bottles scuttling around the UK littering everything up and also so much more recycling will be happening. If these centers are cheap to run and situated in supermarkets and town centers, places we can all get to easily then what could possibly be wrong with this plan? It is absolutely fantastic. The sooner it happens the better!
Unless it means country-wide robberies of people's recycling bins...

As Bill Bryson put it: "What sensible nation would not want to capture and recycle its precious and finite resources? What discerning people would not want to enjoy a litter-free environment?

Start Festival

On Wednesday I went along to the Start Festival in London, held in Clarence House courtesy of Prince Charles. I was there as part of The Green Thing, promoting our new project 'Saved'.

Part of our stand at Start

Saved is all about encouraging people to reuse and rewear old clothes. Four billion new tshirts are bought every year and a quarter of these never get worn, they just hang there in the backs of people wardrobes. Green Thing want to show people that you can take old, boring and rubbish clothes and still wear them. We use reclaimed and recycled fabric to cut into letters spelling 'saved' that we sew onto our donated, unloved tshirts to give them a new lease of life.

The Saved letters, waiting for eco-friendly customers to pick and choose what goes on their tshirt

This project is all about sticking with what you have and resisting the temptation to buy newer things when your old things are still perfectly good!

We've all spent the last six weeks sewing our fingers to the bone to get enough tshirts ready for Start.

Saved!

Each tshirt comes with a little tag telling you its story - what it was saved from, who it was saved by and who it previously belonged to.

Here is my tshirt that I saved and sewed and is ready to be loved again.

Sadly there was no sighting of Prince Charlies himself although there were quite a few celebrities there. None of which I saw with my own eyes but was told by everyone I was with that they spotted someone. I think I was concentrating too hard on sewing...
The festival itself was so amazing, full of great ideas and fantastic designs - the dance floor that powers itself, fleecy coffins, a boat full of children's ideas on what they would take with them into an environmental future, the most rehearsed curry-selling man ever, bee hotels and giant corks. What more could you ask for?

Tipi's and Tree Houses

My life dream is to have my own eco-friendly campsite and so I am always interested in new, different and (pretty importantly) environmentally friendly sites.
I volunteered on a fantastic little site called Camp Spirit in Holland last year. It is a lovingly run, eco site on half of a small island (De Kluut) on the Lake Veluwe. The other half of the island is a nature reserve that campers can walk through and explore. The campsite is made up of around 8 Tipis, 2 Yurts and 3 Sahara tents, all carefully erected and taken down each summer season. They are spread apart, giving you space to camp in peace. The site also offers lots of activities and they run a small boat to and from the island twice a day. I had so much fun on the island, cleaning the tents out, doing some gardening in their vegetable patch and learning about how to run a campsite. Their passion for doing everything sustainably is great and left a real impression on the guests.

One of the smaller Tipis (own photo)

Inside the main social Tipi (own photo)

This morning I was reading the Guardian whilst sat in the sun and I read about this amazing new camping experience in Sweden. In tree houses! It looked fantastic! All the tree houses are different from each other, all designed by architects that are interested in the project. The site is called Tree Hotel and it is about 60km south of the Arctic Circle.
The idea for the site came about when the forest behind the guesthouse of Britta (one half of the owners of Treehotel) was bought for logging. Realising they needed to save the forest they bought the land back and with the help of designers and architects they built the treehouses to prove that this land was more than just timber and money.
Needles to say, everything was built sustainably and with nature in mind. One of the tree houses, The Mirrorcube, is basically what it claims to be, a room built from special mirrored glass, allowing the guest to see out but not be peered in on. But the simple addition of an extra material, an infrared film, makes the cube visible to birds so there are no airbourne injuries.

The Mirrorcube. Photo taken from website.

The little houses are so beautifully designed; some with roof top terraces, some with electronic stepladders that emerge when a secret tree button is pressed, every little detail has been thought through.
The idea of staying way up high, looking out through the trees, all alone in your little safe tree pod is so fantastic. I don't know what would be better; to visit in the winter when the snow has settled over everything and you sit there in your warm, hanging house with the silence of snow, spending your days sledging and going on husky sararis, or visiting in summer with the green light and the energy of animals and creatures just centimeters away outside your windowed wall, canoeing down the river and walking around the picturesque villages.
Either way, I want to go!

I love this recycled glass cup and saucer from Miki (http://www.miki.uk.com/) 

Lots of the items are locally sourced and they are all gorgeous. The sale is very tempting!

Green Things

I spend my Wednesdays working for a cool little company called The Green Thing helping them out with various projects to spread the word about climate change and how we can all do little things every day that does a little good. All the simple things we all know deep down but don't always do.
They use cool projects and ideas to get the point across - videos, competitions, fashion. A great way to capture the younger audiences, making it fun and simple to 'be green'.
Chatting with everyone in the office has opened my eyes to lots of new green ideas and made me more aware of what is going on in the environmental conscious world.