the green gal

What's in a number?

While researching an article on recycling for First News (the national children’s newspaper, I’m the deputy editor) WRAP and the Environment Agency kindly sent me a bunch of stats. Some of them are quite, quite extraordinary. Let me give you an example.

Did you know, that within eight months of a year, the UK produces enough waste to fill Lake Windermere? For those of you who skipped geography that day, Lake Windermere is the biggest lake in England, measuring 10.5 miles long and one mile wide! Crikey, that’s a lot of rubbish.

I’ll continue.

It takes 800 litres of water to make one T-shirt. All that water for one little T-shirt. WRAP tell me that if every household in the UK recycled two T-shirts a year, we’d save as much water as you can fit in 16,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. That’s a LOT of water.

There’s more.

By recycling one can, enough energy is saved to power a TV for three hours. Recycle a can a day and you save enough energy to power a TV for 90 hours. That’s nearly four days without pause! And for anyone out there who claims that recycling a can takes more energy than producing a new one, it really doesn’t. Recycling aluminium uses only around 5% of the energy and emissions needed to make it from scratch.

It gets better.

If you ever doubted that there was a point to you recycling, try this on for size: Recycling one plastic bottle saves enough energy to power a light bulb (60 watt) for six hours. The average UK household uses 373 plastic bottles a year. Recycle all of those and that’s 2,238 hours, or three months, of light saved. Make those light bulbs energy-saving ones and it’s even better! (For double plus goodness ditch the plastic bottle and invest in a reusable one instead.)

And finally. Plastic bags.

Plastic carrier bags are made from oil and oil is a fossil fuel. Non-renewable, when it’s gone, it’s gone. In 2008, UK shoppers picked up 9.9 billion new carrier bags, that’s 400 per household. To produce this number of bags takes 180,000 tonnes of oil and produces greenhouse gases the equivalent of 100,000 extra cars on the road. For those of you out there who rarely or never pick up plastic bags, feel heartened at the amount of oil and emissions you’re saving. For those of you who do pick up a free plastic bag at the till, might you think again?  

Message in a bottle

When I started writing about Belu bottled water I was heading in one direction but on further research I've done a u-turn. I was going to write that bottled water can never be good – why ship water cross-country or in from overseas when you can turn on the tap, the manufacture of plastic bottles uses barrels of oil plus they can't biodegrade so stay on the planet forever. But the odd thing about Belu is that they tell you to drink tap water, that tap water should be everyone's first choice. True, but curious coming from a company selling water (the Dragons would be horrified if confronted with that pitch).

Their view is that sometimes you're not near a tap, or you don't like the taste, and so you are going to buy a bottle of water. And if you're going to buy a bottle of water, make it theirs. (That's sounding more like a commercial business.) But, there's another but, Belu water does, as far as I can find out, appear to be a more eco-friendly choice than other bottled waters. 

The facts:

• the water come from within the UK, Shropshire to be exact
• the bottles are made either from glass or corn and the caps are recyclable
• the corn, or bio, bottle is compostable although commercial composters will break it down more easily than home composters. The bottle can also be thrown in with the rest of your recycling and recycled into other products.
• Belu gives their profits (the amount will be disclosed in a few months, says their website) to Water Aid to fund clean water projects in the UK and abroad
• the company is carbon neutral, sourcing clean energy where possible and offsetting any remaining carbon emissions
• they're working on a tap water filtration system to use in hotels and restaurants – yes they're making money but they're still encouraging tap rather than bottle use

Belu water is sold in some Tesco and Waitrose stores across the country so widely available if you're near one of two supermarkets. A pack of six bottles costs £2.69. Although I will still be trying to refill bottles I already have from the tap, if I am in desperate need of hydration away from home, I will endeavour to choose Belu over a less green brand.