Tonight is 12th night, so it’s time to take down your decorations and cards. That leaves you with the question of what to do with all those greetings now the festive season is over.

In theory you could drop them into your cardboard recycling bag, but it would be far better to have them recycled by the Woodland Trust. It wants to process 100 million cards by the end of the month and, in the process, raise enough money to plant 24,000 trees.

By gathering in and recycling your cards the Trust earns recycling credits from local authorities who pass on the savings they make in not having to tip your unwanted cardboard into a landfill. It also receives donations from some councils and supporters, and is given a chunk of cash by the scheme’s four commercial partners, WHSmith, Tesco, TK Maxx, Marks and Spencer (each of which takes in your cards and passes them to the Trust) and the Recycle Now campaign.

If you’re wondering why this is such an important issue, bear in mind that paper and card makes up around a fifth of all waste put into domestic dustbins, and that at the end of every Christmas season around a billion Christmas cards end up there.

So don’t throw them away: give them to the Woodland Trust and help turn all that waste cardboard back into trees.

Technorati Tags:
recycling, christmas+cards, woodland+trust, waste

I’m all for reusing where possible, and grey water is a big waste area, but I don’t think I could bring myself to organise the plot’s water requirements along the lines suggested by this book.

I found it in Foyles at lunchtime and it’s very comprehensive, even going to great lengths to explain the kind of urinals you can get for women so that they, too, can collect their liquid gold.

Regardless of the fact that foxes and cats probably urinate on a vegetable plot from time to time, and that urine is generally very clean and sterile, I don’t think I could enjoy my vegetables if they’d been fed this way. Neither could I feed them to my friends.

If you could, Liquid Gold: the Lore and Logic of using Urine to Grow Plants can be found on Amazon (£4.49) and second hand on AbeBooks (from £1.82).

Technorati Tags:
garden, gardening, self sufficiency, recycling

I discovered at the weekend that you don’t have to buy from eBay to get your hands on recycled furniture. You can actually buy recycled new.

On a trip to Braintree to buy a new mattress for the spare bed (the last one got thrown out after eight years’ use and a further year of being slept on by my tenants) I dropped into a furniture store on the off-chance it was selling anything that might be right for the house.

My expectations were low: I’ve spent the last few weekends looking at furniture and the suitable items are few and far between.

And yet there in the foyer was just the thing. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was clearly what I’d been after all along.

A table, four chairs and a bench, all made from reclaimed teak. On a fairly good offer, and ready for delivery in a month or so when the house will hopefully be in some kind of order. The chairs were comfortable, the table just the right size, and the bench could be swapped for another two seats for a premium of just £50.

What really appealed, though, was the wood. Teak is a hardwood, and as such it’s slow to grow and you shouldn’t really go chopping it down. Using reclaimed teak, though, gets around that issue, and as a bonus you end up with a wonderfully irregular and slightly worn piece of furniture. The colours are slightly random, and there are a few little bumps here and there, all of which add to the character.

It wasn’t cheap, so buying reclaimed wood clearly fails on one half of the blagger charter (low-cost living), but as it didn’t cost any trees their lives it has green credentials by the bucketload.

And here it is:

Like 10m other Brits did last year, I’ve just upgraded my phone. Partly it was because I wanted a new handset, but primarily it was because Orange was offering a better deal than Vodafone, and it would save me money to switch.

In the end I stayed where I was, as they matched the deal, but as they also gave me a snazzy new Sony Ericsson it means I now have a redundant mobile sitting around at home.

Mobiles are very harmful to the environment if you simply chuck them out, as the battery needs to be property disposed of, and the etched components recycled in an appropriate manner. So, I was pleased to see that when they sent me my new handset, the box packers had also slipped in a postage-paid return envelope, so I could send back my old one. Once they got their hands on it, they’d forward it on to the Third World where it’ll enjoy a useful second life in the sun.

Admirable, yet not entirely enticing, as hanging onto it gives me a fallback should the new one go wrong, get lost or be stolen.

Then I came across envirophone. It pays you to take your phone off your hands, covers all the postage, makes a donation to charity and then recycles the phone, either by sending it on to needier countries, or disposing of it in the proper way.

For my old Sony Ericsson K750i, they’ll pay me £47 in cold, hard cash or, if I prefer, send me £54.05 to spend in Argos, which will come in handy with a house move on the horizon.

Suddenly, hanging on to that old mobile ‘just in case’ doesn’t seem nearly so tempting, while for anyone pondering a paid-for upgrade, where their next mobile won’t be free, a service like this could effectively offset the full cost of a far better handset than the one they already have, depending on the contract they have in mind.

I arrived at work this morning to find my mouse out of action. It’s wireless, so doubtless far more wasteful than a cable-connected pointer, what with the need for the transmitting and receiving parts, and a whole second element plugged into the back of my Mac. Fortunately I don’t feel too guilty about that, as it was sent in for review and nobody asked for it back, so it’s not entirely my fault.

Some quick diagnosis quickly proved that the batteries were flat. Apart from this mouse, the only battery-powered possessions I own are my GPS receiver and the remote for my radio, so I rarely have cause to buy any. Now that I do, though, I started to wonder how green using this kind of mouse might actually be. In fact, how green are batteries in general?

They’re not.

Treehugger reported last week on a newly-published Australian study which revealed that 80% of the environmental cost of batteries - both disposable and rechargable - is incurred in the initial manufacturing process, transportation and shelf-stocking in a shop.

Clearly rechargables only inflict this environmental bruise once, and can then be recharged several hundred times for just the cost of the raw power you’re pumping in. Better still, if you buy NiMH cells, rather than NiCad, you eliminate cadmium from the production cycle altogether.

Cadmium is a particularly nasty chemical element, which if not properly looked after can cause almost as much damage to humans as it can to the environment. As Wikipedia explains:

[T]here have been notable instances of toxicity as the result of long-term exposure to cadmium in contaminated food and water. In the decades following World War II, Japanese mining operations contaminated the Jinzu River with cadmium and traces of other toxic metals. Consequently, cadmium accumulated in the rice crops growing along the riverbanks downstream of the mines. The local agricultural communities consuming the contaminated rice developed Itai-itai disease and renal abnormalities, including proteinuria and glucosuria. Cadmium and several cadmium-containing compounds are known carcinogens and can induce many types of cancer.

As more and more of the electronic gadgets we use in daily life - iPods, mobile phones and the like - ship with batteries that are designed to last the whole of their natural lives, this will become less of a problem, but rather than buying replacement batteries for this mouse I’ll be heading up into the loft tonight to dig out the battery charger that kept me in power throughout my teenage years, when I recycled my AAs for financial, rather than ecological reasons, and in the meantime plugging an old-fashioned cable-tied pointer pusher at work.