The superb Lush shampoo bar

Lush shampoo bars are amazing. They are little discs of shampooingness that you stroke over wet hair and they make your hair smell gorgeous as well as clean it. They are well cool because they don't need any packaging. Liquid shampoo has to come in a plastic bottle or it falls about all over the place onto your bathroom floor and doesn't get anywhere near your head. Solid shampoo bars are, well, solid so all you need is a little box to keep them in, which you can re-use every time you get a new shampoo bar. So by using solid shampoo you reduce the manufacture of plastic, which uses oil, and reduce the need to recycle a plastic bottle. Excellent! Lush also say that you get an average of 80 washes from one of their 55g shampoo bars, and only around 40 washes from one 250g bottle of liquid shampoo, so you only need to make one trip to the shops for double the amount of hair washes. It also means there only need to be half the number of lorry trips from the depot to the shop where you buy your shampoo because you're only going to the shops to buy shampoo half as frequently.

http://www.lush.com

Go Greener. Go Cheaper.

Today my friend Lizzie who's at Liverpool University is coming to visit me in Oxford. She's coming on THE TRAIN. Trains are amazing. The same journey from Liverpool to Oxford will emit so much less carbon if its made on a train rather than on a plane or in a car.

Virgin trains (http://www.virgintrains.co.uk) have recently launched an ad campaign with the slogan "Go Greener. Go Cheaper." Their trains emit 76% less CO2 than cars or short haul flights. A journey from Glasgow to London on a Virgin train will result in 17.6 kg of CO2 emissions. The same journey made in a car will result in 73.6 (!) kg of CO2 emissions. Going from Glasgow to London on a plane will spew out a whopping 83.1 kg of CO2 emissions.

Here are some reasons to love trains.
1. Your carbon footprint diminishes by the size of half of England every time you go on a train instead of a plane or in a car.
2. You get to sit for a couple of hours and be driven to your destination. You can chill for a while. When you're in a car you're a bit busy driving to be getting on with your dissertation or reading the paper, and when you're on a plane you're a bit busy feeling airsick and sick with the knowledge of your excessive carbon emissions to concentrate on listening to the new Travis album.
3. Its well cheap. Book 24 hours+ in advance (http://www.nationalrail.co.uk) and its often half the price. Loads of students have Young Person's Railcards and these get you 1/3rd off ticket prices.
4. If you're going offpeak you can often take your bike on the train with you. So once you arrive you can cycle to wherever you're going instead of having to pay for a taxi!

Go Greener. Go Cheaper. Get the train.

Recycle. The possibilies are endless.

Recycling is great. It makes rubbish into new, lovely things. It also prevents lots of waste from going into landfill sites - which release methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Recycling glass saves energy because making new glass requires a hell of a lot. Recyling plastic means we don't use up even more oil making new plastic. Recycling paper means rainforests, which absorb CO2, aren't destroyed. (Or destroyed so much, anyway.)

If you live in a house or flat your local council probably provides a doorstep collection for recyclable rubbish. If you don't have a Green Box or something similar ring up your local council and ask nicely. If your council is horrifically behind the times and hasn't introduced doorstep recycling yet then you can probably take your glass, plastic, tins, cans and paper to a bring bank nearby. Enjoy the walk. Or cycle.

If you are at university and your Halls or College don't have adequate recycling facilities, email your student representative to ask for bring banks to be installed. Your student representative may have to liase with the local council over this. Tell them it will look great on their CV. And that you will keep emailing them until they do something.

http://www.recyclenow.com is a cool website. Put your postcode into the box and it tells you what your local council collect and where your nearest bring banks are. It also tells you lots of Fun Recycling Facts! Like "every 8 months the UK produces enough waste to fill Lake Windermere".

Are you totally amazing and already recycle everything that your council say you can? Well done. Stand up and take a bow. You're very cool. Do you also recycle Tetrapaks (those annoying drinks cartons that juice and Innocent smoothies come in)? Councils don't collect Tetrapaks for recycling (yet). But you can send your empty ones to the magic recycling plant in Somerset and they recycle the cardboard! Hurray! Download the address labels at http://www.tetrapakrecycling.co.uk. And get that satisfying warm glow of having done something good when you send your cardboard box of empty Tetrapaks off.

How to be Good

Modern Life is Rubbish. Humans have polluted the world with greenhouse gases to the point where most of Britain may be underwater by 2050. Millions in the third world live in poverty, for a large part due to trade injustices. This is set to only get worse as we pump tonnes of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere every day and those in developing countries have to face the worst consequences.

It doesn't have to be this way.

Being "green", "ethical" or "ecofriendly" is now not only trendy but a moral imperative. If you are at a loss as to how to greenify your life or simply need encouragement, heckling and harrassing into switching to energy-saving lightbulbs, avoiding going on a plane ever again and eating only organic locally grown turnips (joke) this is the place to come. If you are amazing and already have only energy-saving lightbulbs, never fly and eat solely organic local turnips then maybe check out some of the links, which might interest you.

Love and (tree)hugs
Charlotte