Why do we all hate plastic bags?(Feb08)
“Why do we all hate plastic bags?” I ask in The New Green Consumer Guide. Now, the headlines are screaming about their horrors and the campaign to ban them seems to be endorsed by every living celebrity. You might think the answer is obvious. Plastic bags are produced in their billions, litter the countryside, pollute […]
Bottled Water – Eau No! (Feb08)
“I’ve been drinking bottled water for 30 years and I’ll go on doing it until the day I die” said one caller to the Radio 5 phone-in I was participating in. The debate was supposed to be about whether it is immoral to drink bottled water. Actually, most of the callers were more concerned with […]
Unwanted phone directories 50 times as high as Everest! (Feb08)
I don’t use phone directories any more – I always look up numbers on the internet. But I’ve still got a pile of these weighty tomes in the corner of my office, collecting dust and doing nothing useful. I’ve now discovered that 50 million telephone directories are distributed each year and 17.5 million of these […]
Christmas waste (Jan08)
One of the most striking things about Christmas is the amount of waste we all produce. Waste heat, waste light, waste food and most of all waste packaging. Actually, quite a lot of presents are wasteful too. I wonder what percentage of gifts are actually appreciated and how many of those are useful. I have […]
Battling for recycling (Oct07)
When I agreed to oppose the motion that ‘Recycling is a waste of time’ it didn’t occur to me that most of the audience would be actively hostile to my position. Set up by the Institute of Ideas, the Battle of Ideas was a whole weekend of debates covering topics as diverse as ‘What’s the […]
Waste disposal is not for seagulls (Jun07)
I love the Brighton buses. Every stop has a sign telling you how long it is before your bus arrives. I also rather liked the sound of seagulls when I woke in the morning a stone’s throw from Brighton beach. But I discovered that residents are not so keen. I had thought that bird-related complaints […]
Food Ethics in practice! (Apr07)
Was rather flustered arriving at my first Food Ethics Council (www.foodethicscouncil.org) meeting and finding no-one in the allocated meeting room at University College London. It transpired that the meeting had moved across the road – and I hadn’t picked up the last minute change on my email. When I heard why the meeting room had […]
