What’s in your closet?

We British like keeping things in our closets (chiefly skeletons, if you believe our popular media). But we also use them to store unused clothes – an incredible $45 billion worth, according to a comprehensive study listed this week by the government waste watchdog Wrap. If it’s to be believed, of the $6,000 of clothes the average Brit owns, 30% are never worn, chiefly due to size changes, and instead of being productively moved along (either sold, recycled or donated) they linger, uselessly cluttering up our storage spaces.

Are we typical? Not compared to the United States. According to Tebea Kay at GOOD, Americans now keep just a fifth of the clothes they buy every year and throw out a whopping 68 pounds of clothing & textiles per person. It’s arguably the price of remaining fashionable, but what happens to the 80% of America’s clothes that head out its door? Valuable items get resold, damaged ones get turned into scrap material for recycling, and between them is the booming worldwide trade in used clothing.

So who do you go to when you move your clothes along? If you regularly take advantage of an inundation of charities leaving plastic sacks for you to fill and them to collect, beware. For the last decade Britons have been battled what has been termed the “great charity collection scam,” a set of bogus companies collecting donated clothes in order to sell them overseas for an entirely uncharitable profit. Nobody knows how much money has been ripped off the unsuspecting public in this way, but it’s sure to be in the millions.

The best advice is simple: make sure you clearly identify who you’re donating your clothes to. The best place for that? A high street charity shop or thrift store, where you’ll know exactly what happens next.

Image: M Car

The post $45 Billion In The Closet? Only In Britain appeared first on EcoSalon.

Every day is better with a new track. 

Te-nderness by ruinseast

Every day we bring you one track for a little musical inspiration. Have a track you want to submit? Email us at contact@ecosalon.com.

Image: ruinseast

The post Daily Track: Te-nderness – ruinseast appeared first on EcoSalon.

It could happen. It’s already being (re)considered in the UK. In 2004, the then British Transport Secretary, Alistair Darling, floated a “green tax” idea that would have motorists paying a road user tax of around  2p to £1.50 a mile, depending on time of day and levels of congestion.

But this road pricing scheme never really stood a chance. Almost 2 million Brits signed a petition against the green tax and as a result it was shelved.

Now a new report by the Committee on Climate Change, an independent body established under last year’s Climate Change Act last year, has suggested that this road pricing scheme is crucial if Britain hopes to meet its legally binding greenhouse gas targets (80 per cent by 2050).

The report recommends that cars be fitted with electronic tracking devices to enable authorities to charge this road user tax of up to £1.50 a mile at peak congestion times. This could, according to the report, save  5.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year  (5% of total road transport emissions) by 2020.

But for any road user tax to be effective, the report states that it needs to be used alongside the current fuel tax. Any reduction in fuel tax to offset the road user tax would defeat the purpose of trying to reduce carbon emissions.

Other recommendations include more stringent enforcement of speed limits, government subsidies to increase electric car purchases, and having everyone take eco-driving lessons.

It will be interesting to see how the British politicians and public respond to these suggestions. (Carrots are always more popular than sticks.)

You can read the full report here.

Image: geoftheref

The post Compulsory Road Pricing to Stop Global Warming? appeared first on EcoSalon.

In Storybook England, medieval cottages with thatched roofs snuggle into rolling green hills criss-crossed with stone walls and hedgerows.

In 21st century England, all this still exists – just. But it could do with some support and your tourist dollars can help.

Much has been written about saving the hedgerows. Probably more than anything else, the hedgerows symbolise the heritage of the English countryside. It’s not just nostalgia, though – hedgerows actually house a substantial portion of England’s biodiversity, too.

Did you know that the same applies to thatched roofs? Thatched cottages have heritage value but they are also expensive to maintain. They might be quaint but since modern materials are cheaper and easier, thatches have been slowly disappearing over the last century. Not only that, but now it seems they are under threat from climate change too, as warmer, wetter weather encourages moss and algae to grow in the thatch while also creating a shortage of straw.

The great shame for environmentalists is that thatched roofs have been around so long they are now an essential part of the ecosystem in England, and indeed in the rest of the United Kingdom and in Ireland, as well. The thatch comes from natural, sustainable materials – the most common type in the UK and Ireland is wheat straw, while some parts of the country use water reed. Once on the house, the thatch itself provides habitat and food for wildlife, especially birds and insects.

If you stay in a thatched cottage, your tourist dollars are automatically helping preserve the tradition. But your money could be even better targeted.

Under the Thatch offers a wonderful and eclectic collection of historic places to stay, mostly in west Wales. (The Ecologist magazine has a nice write-up). Strictly speaking, not all of them are thatched – the site also includes a few unusual options such as a yurt and a Romany (gypsy) caravan. The buildings are wonderful but what makes the company unique are the ethical trading policies.

Profits are used to rescue or conserve heritage buildings at risk, using environmentally-friendly materials, and the site has a policy that all properties must be let year round to help sustain local communities even if they have to resort to bargain-basement prices to do it.

Another good option is to rent a cottage via the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). They have access to cottages mostly in England, Wales and Scotland but also Ireland and continental Europe and brokering the holiday lettings help raises money for the charity’s environmental work.

Image: John Picken (not affiliated with Under the Thatch)

The post Support Biodiversity: Stay in a Storybook Thatched Cottage appeared first on EcoSalon.

If there’s one way to sum up the English, it’s in our approach to community gardening.

Across the Atlantic, gardeners club together and collectively transform large swathes of common land into something beautiful and useful. Agrarian democracy, you might say. Here, it’s feudalism – with the land carved into allotments and parceled out to individuals, for individuals. For a nominal fee to the local town council, an allotment is an Englishman/-woman’s private kingdom to tend and make productive. It’s an opportunity for good, satisfying hard work, a sense of community with one’s neighbors (who often became good friends), and the simple yet deep pleasure that comes from shouting “Gerroff my land!”

In recent years the allotment system has struggled. Growing demand has severely outstripped dwindling supply – from the million allotments available to the public at the end of the Second World War, only a quarter remained by 1997. In recent years the figure has risen – but so has the waiting list of people, currently around the 100,000 mark. In the ’70s it was green issues (championed by the iconic sitcom The Good Life) that made gardening hot again. Now it’s the economy. Free food? Where do I sign?

Our local and national government simply can’t keep up – but it’s just got an enormous boost from a most unlikely direction. The National Trust (a charitable organization looking after historic properties, and one of Britain’s biggest landowners) has just released land for the creation of 1,000 new allotments. That may not sound much compared with demand, but it’s thrown the plight of allotmenteers directly into the limelight – and those 1,000 plots could still create around $2.5 million’s worth of groceries for their lucky owners. There’s also the symbolism: one of Britain’s traditionally conservative organizations (in a literal sense), recognizing that food self-sufficiency is the way forward. Exciting stuff.

A new generation of gardeners and landowners are dragging on their wellies – and while the economy suffers, our green and pleasant land is going to work.

Image: lizjones112

The post Portion Control: the Insatiable Appeal of Allotments appeared first on EcoSalon.

Looks like Britain is experiencing an explosion in their rat population. In fact, according pest control company Rentokil, there are probably more rats living in Britain than humans.

There are various theories floating around as to why this is. Some experts are blaming a shift from weekly to bi-weekly trash collection. Others are saying it’s all tied into the fact that many households have “poorly secured household waste” lying around, a problem that could become more prevalent as the recession takes hold and more properties are deserted and remain empty.

But one enterprising pest-control company, HomeServe, issued a press release this week placing the blaming solely on “the trend for urbanites to live a greener, organic lifestyle unwittingly attracts rodent visitors to the plentiful sources of food and shelter.” Apparently influenced by celebrity chefs such as Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsey, there are up to 1.2 million households in Britain who -¦admit to keeping chickens whilst 8.8 million admit to having a garden compost heap. 19.5 million households say they leave out food for birds and animals. All this is likely to have contributed to the 6.5 million Brits who’ve reported rats in their gardens.”

Image: asplosh

The post Rat Population Explosion Blamed on Green Living appeared first on EcoSalon.

At the other end of Britain to wild and wonderful Cornwall is one of my favorite places in the world – Orkney, a windblown, wind-sculpted scatter of islands off the brink of Scotland. Orkney is a beautiful and welcoming place to live and work in…but first you have to get there. The last hurdle in the formidable land journey up from England is the Pentland Firth.

“The Pentland Firth is well-known by seamen as one of the worst stretches of water in the world.”

– James Lake, quoted in Scapa Flow (1968)

It’s 1995, and I’m visiting Scotland with my uncle. I’ve only vaguely heard of Orkney (is that in Norway?) so we grab sandwiches and a flask of disgustingly stewed coffee and drive the hundred miles to John O’Groats. In late February it’s the perfect departure point, because you instantly want to leave it – nothing but a bleak collection of buildings huddled as close to the ground as modern architecture will allow, and beyond, a gunmetal-grey sea churning angrily against the harbor walls.

I’m having second thoughts. It’s the way the approaching ferry is rolling, lurching and occasionally disappearing altogether. I manage to convince myself that it’ll be fine once we’re out there. I’m wrong – it will be one of the most terrifying experiences of my life.

The Firth is the point where the North Sea and Atlantic, foiled by the length of the U.K., finally manage to vent their fury upon each other. Every day, two tidal surges of astonishing power race up and down this sea lane at speeds of up to 16 knots (30 kph), creating currents and whirlpools with delightful names (“The Swelkie”, “The Merry Men of Mey”) that belie the fact that this waterway still claims lives, even today.

The potential for renewable energy is obvious, leading to the strait being dubbed the “Saudi Arabia of tidal power” – it’s been estimated that it could generate 25% of the tidal energy potential for the whole of Europe. There are already proposals for how that might happen, such as this one by TidalStream.

We’re halfway to St. Margaret’s Hope, and I’m suspecting that her hope was to get there without losing her mind. The boat is riding up one wave, poising at the top, then smacking down into the water like it’s been dropped from a crane. My uncle’s loving it, which he shouts to me with sadistic glee. Mentally I’m in a whole different place, possibly writing my will. There’s only one photo of me from that journey, and my face is an improbable shade of lurid green.

If all this roiling power can effectively be harnessed, the Pentland Firth could supply a significant percentage of the UK’s future energy needs. But taming it? I’m sure we can’t – just as I’m sure I’ll never again try crossing it in February.

Images: Hamed Saber, foxypar4

The post Rough Crossing: Britain’s Tidal Powerhouse appeared first on EcoSalon.