There are all kinds of New Year’s resolutions to make associated with food – eating less or aiming for a more balanced diet, cooking from ingredients rather than processed foods, buying local produce to reduce your carbon footprint, and so on.
Here are some of the best Food Apps for food waste, which doesn’t necessarily mean cutting down on the amount of your own food you waste, but can also mean working with local businesses to make better use of food resources overall.
There are many cleaning jobs around the home that get forgotten about or ignored during the hustle and bustle of our busy daily lives. However, now is a good time to tackle those tasks, shift the grime build-up, and have a declutter. It sounds like hard work, but it’s actually very satisfying, and your house and family will thank you for it.
Hiring a skip may help your spring cleaning, as you’ll no doubt uncover lots of clutter you no longer need along the way.
This guide will help you organise this year’s spring clean, and make sure you don’t forget any important jobs.
The blight of fly tipping in the UK’s beauty spots since 2010 has diverted over £1.2 million from funds that could otherwise be used to protect woodland against disease, or to plant new trees to create future forests.
Figures from the Woodland Trust show 2016 was the worst year on record for the crime, with a total clean-up cost of over £350,000 – more than a quarter of the entire amount spent since the start of the decade.
If you’re looking to save money in the new year, there are some simple steps you can take around the house to cut down on your essential outgoings, reduce household waste and potentially learn a new craft all at the same time.
Here are just a few things to try, which should help you through the new year with a few more funds leftover.
We think of food as a renewable resource – in some cases it literally grows on trees – but producing enough food for everyone has huge implications in terms of energy usage, carbon emissions, the land area taken up by farming and the associated cost of all of those things.
They say one person’s trash is another’s treasure, and when it comes to recycling Christmas waste that can be an especially true adage.
According to research from Sainsbury’s Bank, 5% of people ‘re-gift’ items they received in previous years, or even earlier in the same festive season.
Among these, 8% of people – over 150,000 working-age Britons – do so because they don’t want to harm the environment by buying something else, and 40% or over 750,000 people re-gift to avoid waste.
During a season of celebration, reducing Christmas waste can be a major challenge, and one that is easy to overlook, but there are some simple steps we can all take to keep more festive materials out of landfill sites.
The autumn is a peak time for edible waste, and while Christmas food waste is a major concern for many households and businesses, it is by no means the start of the seasonal problem.
Already UK households have carved 15 million pumpkins without eating the flesh, according to Hubbub, enough to give everyone in the country a bowl of pumpkin soup.
A third of people believe the pumpkins we carve for Halloween are an inedible variety, and more than half don’t think of them as food.
Combined with other celebrations like Easter and, of course, Christmas food waste, the UK throws away 7 million tonnes of edible waste every year.
Christmas is coming, and in these final few weeks before the holiday season really begins, there’s just enough time left for a proper clear-out to make room for all the guests and gifts you might be welcoming, or just to go into the new year in tidier surroundings.
Here are five things you might want to recycle in the run-up to Christmas, clearing the way for whatever festivities lie ahead for you and those close to you.
Continue reading Five things to recycle to make way for Christmas
As the autumn turns to winter (winter officially begins on December 21), it’s the time of year to clear out the garden and prepare it to survive the oncoming frost.
With a few simple steps, you can dump the dead wood in a skip, pile leaves and lighter organic waste into your compost bins, and leave behind a fairly blank canvas ready for your spring planting to come through.
One of the landmark events in the run-up to Christmas is also a red flag – quite literally – for companies aiming to go green as we move into the new year.
This is the time of year when the major coffee shop chains release their festive takeaway cups, which include the infamous Starbucks ‘red cups’, along with seasonal designs from the other big brands too.
It’s a marketing gimmick that puts the traditional red and green colour scheme of Christmas into customers’ cold hands on the morning commute from early November right through December, but it poses a challenge to sustainability too.
Continue reading Avoid the red cups and go green this Christmas
