It’s a bit late for me but I do like the idea of a green wedding, although this article seems to be mostly about the wedding list. If you don’t want presents then donating money is OK but lets face it – we all want presents. A more impressive gesture would be to ask everyone to find recycled presents for you. Make your guests work for their wedding breakfast.
I had my own version in that we kept it small, we bought locally and tried to be sustainable. Lets not talk about the flights to Scotland though!!! I got married in a stone circle near Kenmore back in 2003. We were in a field so I think that counts as a “green” wedding!
Sinar Mas are a big company that make paper and palm oil. They do it by slash and burning then clearing huge areas of rainforest and peatland in Indonesia releasing massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and making this third world country the world’s third worst CO2 polluter.
Greenpeace have stuck their head above the parapet and revealed which supermarkets in the UK take products from Sinar Mas…. Tesco (no surprises there) and Walmart (Asda). Other famous brands that do business with them are KFC, Pizza Hut, Dunkin Donuts and Campbell’s soups.
So it’s up to us to decide where we do our shopping and whether we want to spend our hard earned cash on companies prepared to do business with world wreckers.
To be fair – this Greenpeace article says Tesco has stopped buying from them but it’s the principle of the thing.
Clean, green energy is the holy grail for power suppliers at the moment and while the Bloom Box isn’t perfect, it certainly looks like a better bet.
It’s being financed by the guy who financed the Segue, eBay and Google and it uses wafers made of baked sand and painted with green and black inks to generate power (don’t ask me, I don’t work for NASA). The inventor did work for NASA and was trying to find ways to generate oxygen for the population of Mars project! When that plan was ditched, he wondered if he could use the technology in a different way and so the Bloom Box was born.
The idea of a home energy “server” that can power your home is exciting because it reduces the amount of electricity “lost” through transmission as well as meaning energy companies don’t need to spend as much on huge power stations (remember China is building LOADS of coal fuelled power stations). Although it still uses carbon based fuel, the amounts are reduced meaning what we have will last much longer.
Google have already bought into the idea and bought four of the big wahoonies to power their servers and talks are underway with giants like Coca Cola.
One thing we can be certain of though. Your bloom box won’t come labelled “Bloom” it will say Npower or Eon. We aren’t going to get rid of the power companies just yet!
You can read more for it here and against it here.
At the moment we are all looking for recycled stuff on eBay and Freecycle but this site is trying to combine everything in one place along with help and advice.
It looks to be run by passionate people. Lets hope it takes off.
