Author: Lucy Ravenhall

World Environment Day 2017 takes place on Monday, June 5th, and the fact that it falls on a weekday means that households and businesses alike can get involved in recognising the event and taking action to protect the environment in response to it.

This year’s WED has an overall theme of Connecting People to Nature, and although it follows hot on the heels of the two bank holiday weekends in May, it could be a good opportunity to take a day’s annual leave and spend some time outside instead.

Here are a few ways you can mark World Environment Day 2017 this June 5th, whether you are at work or at home.

Continue reading Gearing up for World Environment Day

We could all stand to make our food go further, whether as an attempt to make better use of our household budgets, reduce food waste, or just keep the bins emptier between collection dates.

But what are the tricks of the trade when it comes to sustainable food consumption – and how can they help you to cut your food waste?

Continue reading Sustainable Food: a few tricks of the trade

Nobody in the food service industry wants to see edible food go to waste – especially if you pay by weight for your bins or skips to be emptied – but how do you prevent customers from leaving unwanted remnants on their plates?

Here are ten ways to tackle the issue head-on, some of which are relatively innovative, while others are simple common sense.

1. Portion Control

The most obvious way to avoid food waste is to keep portions under better control. That doesn’t mean skimping on the quantities you serve, but if customers rarely finish their food, you may be serving too much.

Continue reading How to reduce restaurant food waste

DVDs and CDs take up much less space than old VHS tapes and audio cassettes – especially when stored without a protective jewel case – but with 2017 marking both the 35th anniversary of the creation of compact discs, and the 20th anniversary of DVDs reaching American markets (followed a year later by Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia), it’s no surprise that many of us have mounting numbers of unwanted discs to deal with.

The formats have been largely superseded by high-density formats like Blu-ray, which itself marked its tenth anniversary in 2016, but also by the use of cloud storage and portable storage on devices like smartphones.

So how can you dispose of CDs and DVDs in an eco-friendly way? The analogue formats that preceded them – such as VHS tapes – are now rarely recycled, and unfortunately optical media is going the same way.

Continue reading How to recycle DVDs and CDs

A fast-thinking farmer made headlines after using his tractor and trailer to block the exit of a white van caught red-handed fly tipping on his land.

The incident near Selby, just south of York, made local and national headlines as the farmer was praised for taking steps to prevent the culprit from leaving after dumping a load of rubbish in his field.

Continue reading Farmer blocks fly tipper