Buy One Get One Tree

Innocent the ethical smoothie maker have launched a campaign to plant at least 100 000 trees in Africa (where they grow their mangos) and India, that's enough to cover 200 football pitches. From each 1 litre pack a tree will be planted by entering a unique code on the back of the pack, registering takes less than a minute and you can gift your tree to someone else if you wish, especially coming in to the Christmas season.

You can keep an eye on the treeometer on the home page of the microsite which keeps tally of every tree planted real time, 87 763 as I look now, and details the latest planters name. If you want you can travel to the virtual forest and search for your tree.

I love this new sustainability effort by Innocent, they are a leading brand and have ethics and sustainability at the core of their business practice, they have 100% recycled packaging (not kids cartons ... yet), all their bananas are Rainforest Alliance certified, and after releasing their huge carbon footprint label are now working with our suppliers and bottlers to achieve a reduction of 15% in 2007.

"It may all sound a bit Miss World, but we want to leave things a little bit better than we find them. To do business in a more enlightened way; where we take responsibility for the impacts of our business on society and the environment, and move these impacts from negative to neutral, or better still, positive. We call this our drive for sustainability."
Innocent Drinks

Click here for why trees are good and why Innocent is ethical.

The tree planting project will be carried out by Carbon Clear, an offsetting company, whose projects include retrofitting mini-taxis in the Philippines and low smoke cooking in the Sudan. Whilst I fully support the project I am sure we are all aware of the Coldplay incident which has tarnished the reputation of carbon offsetting via tree planting in the last few years (their offsetting was provided by Future Forest, a British company, recently renamed CarbonNeutral). I'm sure however the project will be managed efficiently by both Carbon Clear and Innocent for the long term under the scrutiny of Innocent drinkers and Innocent themselves.

Tesco currently have innocent smoothies at 2 for £4.

Picture: Tidal Surge Batters England

The south east of England yesterday saw the largest tidal surge in half a century, the waters were nearly 8in (20cm) lower than originally feared and passed without causing major damage. In 1953, 307 people died, when high tides and a storm saw a tidal surge of 3.2m (10ft 6in).

Picture: Rachel Temple

Energy Saving Tip # 2 - Boiling the Kettle

I'm sure you all know that boiling more water than you need wastes energy. But how much energy are we all wasting?

In the United Kingdom tea drinking is a national institution, we down a scalding 1909 cups of tea every second, 6.8m every hour, and 165m every day, according to figures from the UK Tea Council. This unsurprisingly uses up alot of energy, a kettle uses up to 3kW of electricity. In an article in by the Times Online blog using a 2.2kw kettle it took 100 seconds to boil. This equates to about 1.68m kWh in electricity consumption to boil the actual water used in cups of tea.

But 67% of people boil more water than is actually required for their cup of tea. I have not been able to find actual statistics for how much they overfill the kettle by other than from a few sites which claim we on average use twice the amount of water than is required. This would mean that we are wasting around 1.68m kWh a day from our tea addiction. Adding in coffee drinkers this extends to 2.33m kWh per day or 1056 tonnes of CO2 a day from electricity use, the equivalent to about 149 000 cars, or an annual 6.36kg of CO2 per capita.

To what cost you may ask; a cool £91m a year.

After computing my back of an envelope figures I found a report by DEFRA on the same topic which suggested a daily energy saving of 3.42m kWh (1547 tonnes per day).

So what can you do to reduce your impact;

• The Eco Kettle
  The innovative Eco Kettle has a unique double chamber that gets you to measure out exactly how much water you want to boil, saving electricity, water, money and time, making it better for the planet... and you still get to have a great cup of tea. That's smart thinking - making the eco kettle one of our favourite eco products, and an essential for any eco friendly kitchen or workplace. Using a kettle to boil more water than you need is the equivalent to powering 300 CFLs unnecessarily.
  
• Referring to the measure on the side can help you to accurately determine the amount of liquid necessary
• Measure how much water you require by filling the cup or saucepan you are planning to use and then pour this water into the kettle, remembering to add a little bit extra to compensate for evaporation
  
  

Energy Saving Tip # 1 - Staples

I've decide to add a daily tip to the blog, some of which I am sure you have already implemented, and others you might not. I will try to add a new dimension to these tips by delving into some of the potential savings that could be amassed from taking on such tips.

If each of the 10m office workers were to use one less staple per day this would amount to 328kg per day and over 120 tonnes of steel over a year. In energy terms this would be over one million kwh of electricity used and almost 500 000kg of CO2 reduced. A viable alternative to staples are stapleless staplers (and can hold together upto 7 sheets of paper, not to mention office-chic in Japan) or reuseable paperclips.

Why Stapleless Staplers are Japan Office Chic?

• No Staples [You never have an emergency staple moment]
• No Need to Remove Staples
• Easy to Shread Documents
• Less Frequent Jams & Irritating Stapler Related Problems
• Safe for Children [Just search staple in YouTube]
  

Whilst Im sure you are not moved by the figures to ban staples in the office just yet, it shows the impact a small action can have on a national scale. I found this stapleless stapler for under $3 USD including shipping and can hold 5 sheets together. Take into consideration the number of staples you use or in some magazines, supplements, business document, retailers and mail. That's alot of staples.