Picture the scene:  a small communal galley kitchen in a building full of serviced offices.

There are two bins - One clearly labelled "Recyclable", the other clearly labelled "Non Recyclable". In addition there is an extra sign over the "Recyclable" bin reiterating that it is for "recyclable" stuff and in BIG CAPS it further clarifies that "NO FOOD ITEMS" are to go in the recyclable bin.

Now, if that's not clear enough there is also a little sign above the area with a list of all the things that safe to be considered recyclable and those that are not.

Easy, right?

It's Earth Day 2012, folks. What are you doing to mark the fact?

One of the main thrusts of the day is to promote green awareness and especially to push for people to be more aware of and involved in their environment.  The "billion acts of green" is a good start, and amongst the suggestions I've seen a number of actions or pledges made for Earth Day 2012, some of them being...

To mark Earth Day 2012 Google put up their Google doodle this morning in the form of a flowering Google logo.

Just go to www.google.co.uk right now and have a look.

Blooming marvellous, aye? :)

Image courtesy of Crowcombe Al on flickr
One of my mountain biking friends forwarded me a link the other day to a campaign to protect the Quantock Hills. Whilst I don't recall having cycled in the Quantocks, the name was instantly familiar as it regularly crops up in the biking calendar for our MTB group's day rides.

Photographers Sebastião Salgado and Per Anders Pettersson present a selection of previously unseen photographs from the ongoing "Genesis" project at Somerset House, London. Showing images shot entirely in the Amazon, the exhibition is in aid of the Sky Rainforest Rescue campaign, a joint venture between the b

My wife found this on facebook this morning. Doesn't this just hit the mark? Here's a transcript of the image text:

 [Image of spoon]

It's pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to

• Extract oil from the ground
• Ship it to a refinery
• Turn it into plastic
• Shape it appropriately
• Truck it to a store
• Buy it, and bring it home

...is considered to be less effort than what it takes to just wash the spoon when you're done with it.

It's been reported today that the cycling industry is worth some 3 billion pounds to the UK economy.

With cycle-manufacturing, cycle accessory manufacturing, retail and other cycle-related employment all thrown into the mix, that's a healthy figure and a good sign of the state of the cycling industry in this country.

As many as 23,000 people are employed in these UK cycle and cycle-related industries and they contribute some £600 million to our economy in wages and taxes.

Bottled Water. A multi million (billion?) pound industry where businesses put water in bottles, market it heavily and make big fat profits.

And all you need to do is turn on the tap and out it comes. You already pay your water rates/have a water meter, so why on earth are you paying someone else to make big profits on something you're already paying for?

And then there's the whole industry of making the plastic bottles to fill up and throw on the streets or in the trash - What a waste of resources, just take a reusable bottle out with you, fill it up at home.

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We've had an interesting email from the Make Wood Work campaign.

In essence, the UK Government's Renewables Obligation (RO) policy encourages the use of bio-mass burners for electricity generation with financial subsidies. Whilst, from an environmentally-friendly point of view, biomass burning creates energy from waste materials, the forest products industry is concerned that using wood for bio-mass burners will damage their industry.

{EAV_BLOG_VER:d8d8317f40d9f024}I had an opportunity to chat with one of our local street cleaners the other day and he was saying that our local McDonald's was the worst offender in terms of the sheer amount of litter he had to pick up. One day during the week he completely filled 10 large refuse sacks full of just McDonalds trash.