Looking for Eco Friendly products

Rachb2

O.k. well probably not what anyone would want to do on here, but there is a very useful (if a bit dry) book called Time to Eat the Dog: the ultimate guide to sustainability, which I found useful. It runs through almost eveything that you could possibly think about in your everyday life and how to make greener, more eco-friendly choices. There is also a book that Amnesty International produces every year called the Good Shopping Guide, which looks at all the major suppliers for lots of different everyday products and services. The book ranks them according to eco-friendliness, human rights, pollution and loads of other ethical indicators and I like being able to make informed choices about where to shop and which companies to avoid.

I use Nigel's Eco-Store quite a lot and love the fact that they reuse packaging several times, which is possibly my biggest problem with online shopping. I mainly use Ecover cleaning products, but also use home-made cleaners like lemon juice and bicarbonate of soda, which I find as good as bought products and cheaper. I also have bought a couple of nifty products that allow me to use fewer cleaning products. Instead of a toilet duck style freshner, I use a magnetic disc from NES that neatralises all toilet smells. I also use Magna-Loo and a similar thing for my washing machine that prevents limescale build up. Instead of using through away sponges and the like for washing up I bought a loofah from the Ethical Superstore, which is carbon neutral (because it's grown), lasts for up to a year and biodegrades so can be just put with your compost waste.

In terms of eating green-er, well we live in a first floor flat, so we grow herbs and tomatoes but not much else (although we are on our local allotment waiting list). We found a local shop that runs a veg box scheme, we get a box of veg for £7.50 a week delivered by an LPG van. All the veg is grown within 10 miles of the shop and is all organic. We also use a local butchers and their meat and eggs come from within about 25 miles of the shop. We make our own bread (much easier than I thought it would be) with flour that is grown and milled within sight of our home. Basically we've reduced our food miles as much as possible....we also eat seasonally, which means extra fertilisers, heat and water aren't required for growing our vegetables. It's really easy to find our online what's available seasonally in your area. There is a good website called eat the seasons, which has plenty of recipes etc for seasonal food. We also use a website called allotment.org, which is a great resource for growing your own produce and using it.

In terms of presents, well for the last few years I've made my own hampers. I've collected jam and other glass jars from friends and relatives, bought what seems like a ton of fairtrade sugar (grown in the UK) and taken to foraging. It is amazing what is available in the hedgerows in your area. This year's hampers included: hawthorn jelly, hedgerow jelly, apple and blackberry jam, homegrown tomato chutney, homegrown beetroot chutney, crab apple and chilli jelly, rosehip syrup, elderberry syrup, sloe gin, damson vodka, locally produced honey, home-made crackers, locally produced cheese, homemade pork pies and some homemade pate....phew! Obviously it was quite a bit of work, but do you know what, I'd much rather be wandering in the countryside collecting berries than fighting in the shops in December. It also meant that I had done all my hampers more or less by the end of October. Those that didn't get hampers were either given a home-made present, a re-gifted present, something from a charity shop or gifted an experience.

I suppose the greenest thing you can do, which requires very little effort, is to buy less stuff. If you can make everything you have last for as long as possible, then give it a second use and even a third, you're sending less to landfill, saving money and not needing new products. If you do need to buy something, can you get it second hand? My whole flat is furnished with second hand furniture that I have either been given or found in junk yards/charity shops. I've cleaned it and perhaps painted some of it and given it a new use. Oh and remember that if you like reading, borrowing books from the library is greener than buying new ones, you can also get cds and dvds. If you're into watching films, think about signing up to something like lovefilm rather than buying dvds outright. If you like handbags/shoes/clothes what about setting up a swap shop with your friends? You could have a drink together, some fun and then browse all the unwanted things people have brought and have a swap.

It's quite amazing how my attitude to buying stuff has changed over the years, and you will have to take baby steps, I didn't do all this all at once, it sounds like a lot of work when I start typing it out, but I've never been happier! Good luck!

ecokimbo

greenivy wrote: »

If you are looking for eco friendly products you may care to take a look at a company called Wikaniko. Through local distributors Wikaniko sells a range of over 850 top quality eco products for the home and family.

Wikaniko is rapidly making a name for itself in the environmentally friendly market. You also have the opportunity to buy the products at discounted prices by joining as a co-op club member.

I'm coming up to my 3rd anniversary as a distributor with Wikaniko. Not only has it helped me to live a more ecofriendly lifestyle it has also enabled me to make an income by retailing the products to others.
We try to grow our own as much as we can and have also changed energy suppliers to save money (they also give us cashback on our groceries)
My friends and i swap kids clothes, toys and books which can save loads of money and some of my friends with allotments are able to sell their extra produce to friends

Mama_Cookie

Tea_Hee_23 good for you. You can't get any more sustainable than buying fair trade goods. Not only are the relationships between producers & suppliers sustainable but the raw materials used in the manufacturing process of many of the arts & crafts produced are also from sustainable crops or waste. For example, elephant dung makes great paper as does cotton rag and bannana fibre, not a single tree has to be chopped down either.

billsavings

ecokimbo wrote: »

I'm coming up to my 3rd anniversary as a distributor with Wikaniko. Not only has it helped me to live a more ecofriendly lifestyle it has also enabled me to make an income by retailing the products to others.
We try to grow our own as much as we can and have also changed energy suppliers to save money (they also give us cashback on our groceries)
My friends and i swap kids clothes, toys and books which can save loads of money and some of my friends with allotments are able to sell their extra produce to friends

Your find a fair few Wikaniko Distributors have tried to promote there network marketing business here,touting for recruits biz etc.

Mama_Cookie

How about this little gadget, a Wireless Energy Monitor.........they provide real time information on the amount of electricity you are using in terms of power, cost and carbon emissions. You can watch the benefits of turning off electrical devices at home by seeing the cash impact on a digital display. I bought one from the ethical superstore a while back for around £40 but I did send it back as it was not suitable for our fuse box. If I remmember rightly you clamped a device to the wires coming out of your fuse box & then had a digital display to place wherever in the home you chose. My thoughts were that if my family could see the financial impact in black & white of leaving appliances switched on then they would be horrified, change their habits & my eleccy bill would be dramatically slashed. The only problem was that my wires from my fuse box have been chased into the wall so I could not fit it. Great idea though, worth investigating.
Has anyone ever tried to have a plastic free fortnight in terms of shopping? It's difficult, what if you needed to buy a plug, a suitcase, sunglasses, anything atall in plastic packaging, a toothbrush, baby dummies or bottles, the list is endless & i'm sure a Wireless Energy Monitor must have a bunch of plastic components not to mention the casing on the digital display !!!! I haven't tried this yet but I will do very soon.

rogerblack

The fun part is working out what you mean by 'eco friendly'!

Do you mean low CO2?
Low global warming of all sorts?
Good for UK farmers?

Some things and ideas are a clear win - for example, if you find that using a third of the washing powder works for you at the same temperature - there is no downside.

But, for example, you might think buying tomatos from your local farm is more eco-friendly than having them shipped all the way from spain.

Only the local farmer heats his tunnels with gas, to extend the growing season, which more than cancels out the fuel usage needed to ship the spanish ones.

Plastic isn't always bad.
It can - done right - be a very very low waste method of packaging.
A couple of examples that spring to mind are the orange polypropylene string bags around oranges, the wrap of slightly thicker than cling-film around cabbages, and meat joints sealed in tightly fitting fairly thick plastic.

In all these cases, the plastic weighs well under half a percent of the product weight.
It may in some cases be a net benefit, as it means - for example - you don't need to discard the outer leaves of the cabbage that may get damaged if it was unpacked.
If the energy used to grow those leaves was greater than the energy lost in producing and recycling the plastic - it's a net win.

chubbster_1

A few recomendations I can offer...

http://www.inasoapnutshell.com/ - they sell soapnuts which someone else has already mentioned. They also offer a free sample (well sae required but otherwise free), so you can try them before you buy lots. They're also one of the cheapest places I've found that sell them dry (easier for storage and they last longer than the pre-wet ones)!

http://www.biggreensmile.com/ - an excellent site for buying 'green'. They sell beauty products and household products, and you can select in a variety of ways depending on what method of 'greenness' you're aiming for... i.e. you can choose items that aren't tested on animals, or that are made in the uk, or that don't contain parabens etc. Not always the cheapest store, but they do package in a very green manner too when they send items out, and even if you shop elsewhere in the long run they're brill to help you find out more.

http://www.thegreenlivingforum.net/ a forum full of people who are all trying to be greener in one way or another. Light green to dark green, solar to growing your own to recycling to.. well everything covered here. Have a look, register, say hello - a very friendly place!

Ben84

The good and bad thing about this is that there's potentially endless things you could do. The good thing is that you almost certainly will find something you want to do and are enthusiastic about, but the down side is knowing what's best to do. There can also be an element of people making lots of effort to do things with modest returns. With limited time and money, I think it important to consider the relative value of how you spend it carefully.

Switching to eco products may have some environmental benefit, but I'm pretty convinced the average household would do more for the environment by insulating their house and getting a low water flush toilet installed. They would also stand to save a lot of money this way. I don't believe that making better use of resources has to be expensive or hard work, if anything done well it should be easier.

In the UK, we are also still largely failing at the moment to close the materials loop with consumer products, we have yet to find efficient ways to return most items to manufacturers and often those that are get turned in to lower value goods with little or no further uses possible. The destruction of the original item's form is also common. Why smash glass bottles and melt them down only to make new ones? I know in Russia they're collected, cleaned and used again with a deposit system. Recyclable is a big thing right now in the UK, but reduction and reuse is more important. With a bit of investigation, very long lasting reusable items are available (heavy duty washing up gloves that last months and razors where you only change the blade for example) and so are very low mass packaging options (soda crystals for cleaning the house come in a lightweight plastic bag, solid shampoo and super-concentrated products use less materials too). Few of these products are sold as eco products, but they do have strong environmental benefits.

I do have concerns about the usual mail order green product suppliers. Many of the products have dubious green claims, including a lot of disposable single use things (there may be demand, but it's not green), high prices (saving resources shouldn't be costly or limited to people who can afford it) and the home delivery aspect of the business model certainly adds a fair bit more pollution to each item's total. A lot of these items also come in premium brand style packaging and no amount of recyclable/recycled materials in the packaging makes up for just using too much materials per item. I really think a lot of green product manufactures could learn a lot about sustainable packaging by going around ALDI!

tuttifruiti20

Perhaps you might want to make yourself a chart of the sorts of things you think you could do - some might be easy some hard, some cheap some more expensive, but it'd give you an idea of what you could and couldn't manage at the moment.

For most people some of the easiest things to do to be greener actually cost nothing.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle....

Reduce what you buy - the less you buy and consume the more environmentally friendly you're being.

Reuse anything that can be reused. Make old clothes into new things etc.

Recycle by joining groups like freecycle, don't throw out anything that could be given away or recycled locally, get a compost bin etc.

Admiral_Ken

If you have any electrical lighting around the home, solar garden lighting is the way forward. No wiring required and hassle free, as well as saving you money on your energy bills. Check out a company called Solar Gadgets Limited,they have a wide range of quality solar lighting that could benefit you.