Heck, even climate scientists and activists need a beer after a week in the lab or on the street. And when they do, they may well turn to the beers below, thoroughly researched for their sustainability practices by 1 Million Women.
Tag Archives | sustainable
Scruples and scrunchables: how to get rid of soft plastics
You can’t turn all of your old plastic bags into giant puffer-fish like the one above, so what are you going to do with your ready-to-burst cupboard full of old scrunchables? Sean Dostal of Honest Grub shares his methods for ensuring that those bits of plastic we accumulate don’t end up in a turtle’s stomach.
Meat-Free Week
After Sonya Blan’s thoughtful piece on meat a couple of editions ago, we have news that a meat-free or meat-reduced diet might make you happier, as well as healthier (not to mention kinder on animals and the environment). Naturally, we also have some handy info to help you out.
Binning the trash: how to avoid packaging
Gabrielle Chariton peered into our bins and unearthed our landfills to dig up the story of packaging. Why do we use so much of it? And how can we use less?
If it’s broke, fix it: on being a conscious consumer
An Amazon.co.uk warehouse during the Christmas rush. Photo credit: D K (Flickr)
Ashleigh Stallard is here to dispel the myth that you can’t live according to your ideals without emptying your bank account and spending every waking moment researching supply chains. Ashleigh runs the design blog Shift.
Meet your meat
You might question whether Sonya Blan is qualified to write about meat, being vegan and all. But Sonya has a long past with meat-eating, and she wants to share what she found. Whether you’re the kind who likes strips of bacon on your veal sandwich, or you eat an organic, free-range chicken but once a fortnight, if you haven’t already – meet your meat.
How good is that fabric you’re wearing?
Everyone wears clothes – probably even the most diehard nudists, sometimes – so whether you’re an avant-garde fashionista or a committed dag, you should know the ethical dimensions of the fabric we wear. Jess Noble is a veteran Otter writer with fashion-industry experience.
Cook lucks: turn random ingredients into dinner with friends
How to get off the grid with solar energy
It’s now more achievable than ever to go “off the grid”. In the sustainability world, going off-grid means becoming self-sufficient power-wise, independent of the mainstream energy system, and severing your ties with fossil fuel electricity, in some cases making money along the way by feeding power back into the grid. Even if you don’t own your own home, more options for home solar are now available, thanks largely to recent developments in battery technology.
Voting with your dollar: Otter’s guide to boycotts
By Tony Ryan.
We owe the word “boycott” to Charles C Boycott, but Charles didn’t stage the first boycott in history, or popularise the practice – he copped the boycott that gave boycotting its name. An English landowner in Ireland, Boycott was economically shunned by his entire community in 1880 after he evicted tenants who couldn’t pay.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Boycotts can be personal affairs, as with my own (mostly) steadfast refusal to eat fast food (12 years running, if you don’t count one regrettable, alcohol-soaked lapse).[/pullquote]
Charles may have been incensed that his name was borrowed that way, and, being an old-timey member of the landed class, he may have been the kind of bloke to be equally angered that boycotting caught on as a popular mode of activism – the most popular form, if you ask George Monbiot. Since Charles’s day, boycotts, mass refusals to patronise a company – or even a whole country – on the grounds of its behaviour, have been many and various: they’re prompted by concerns ranging from animal welfare and workers’ rights to environmental degradation. They can be well organised, as with the famous Delano Grape Strike of the ’60s, in which over 14 million Americans refused to eat grapes produced by the labour of underpaid workers in the States, or they can peter out with a whimper. They can span hemispheres and beyond, as has the decades-long fight over Nestlé’s sales of baby formula to developing countries, and they can be personal affairs, as with my own (mostly) steadfast refusal to eat fast food (12 years running, if you don’t count one regrettable, alcohol-soaked lapse).