Sustainable tourism doesn’t have to mean island-hopping around Sri Lanka or spending your vacation planting trees in the rainforest – you can have a green holiday much closer to home when you go camping in the UK.
Author: Lucy Ravenhall
The lowdown on sustainable coffee
Coffee is big business and a perennial favourite when it comes to issues like sustainability and social justice, from organic farming to Fairtrade deals for coffee growers and the ongoing work to tackle recycling of disposable coffee cups.
Household jobs that might well need skips
When you’re planning big household jobs, it’s always worth giving some thought to whether or not you need a domestic skip – the kind you might see in a driveway or at the roadside any time renovation work is carried out.
Five DIY lessons to learn before attempting DIY
If your home improvement skills are more ‘don’t it yourself’ than ‘do it yourself’, you might feel reluctant to try your hand at any new projects – but with a few simple DIY lessons to learn before attempting DIY again, you can avoid some of the most common pitfalls.
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A top guide to sustainable beer
The bars and pubs where we drink beer are usually not within sight of the breweries where it is made, especially in the case of the big-brand lagers produced en masse at out-of-town locations.
Large-scale breweries are industrial operations on a massive extent, with machinery impressive enough to be used for the engineering decks in a Star Trek movie, and it has become a running joke among some Trekkers that the Starship Enterprise has its own brewery on board.
Five ways to improve your recycling at home
Recycling at home is a great way to be kinder to the environment – a close second to simply cutting down on the amount of waste your household produces, which of course we can all do to a limited extent.
In fact these days there is very little that cannot be recycled at all, and these are our five top tips to improve your recycling at home, even if you think you already do pretty well.
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Why you should eat locally grown food
Food waste is one of the big environmental issues of recent years, and many of us are more conscious than ever about throwing away otherwise edible food, putting vegetable peelings into the general waste bin, and the associated landfill problem caused by the wrappers from pre-packaged food.
Upcycling projects you can finish in an afternoon
Fast upcycling projects can transform your home while only taking up an afternoon of your time – you can even complete a very quick upcycling project while the paint is drying on another, if you’re feeling particularly organised.
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Keeping cool around Leeds: best places to relax
Leeds is a diverse city with plenty to offer, but when summer hits its peak, many residents feel the pull of the great outdoors.
You don’t actually have to get out of the city itself to keep cool around Leeds – there are plenty of places to relax that are easily reached on foot or via public transport, or in your own car within a matter of minutes.
Here’s our round-up of some of the best places to relax and keep cool around Leeds, from the city centre to the nearby surrounding area.
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Keeping cool the environmentally friendly way
The UK is hardly the worst affected country when it comes to keeping cool in summer – Japan, for instance, relies so much on air conditioning in hot weather that it faces an annual balancing act between all-out power cuts and deaths due to heatstroke.
But our usually mild climate means we are often less prepared to cope when a heatwave hits, and that can lead to the temptation to throw eco-friendliness out of the window as you plug a desk fan into every available power socket.
Here are five of the best alternatives to keep cool without running up a huge energy bill, or adding unduly to your carbon footprint.
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