I’m so impressed at the volume of recycled office products available, so if you’re office isn’t green yet, pay attention.

Meetings and training sessions become greener with NOBO ReCycled Flip Chart Pads.

Keep your project notes neat and together while you’re on the go with the Elba Touareg Folder.

File your important documents in your (hopefully second hand) filing cabinet with these Elba Vertic file Suspension Files.

Take notes in meetings in one of these Black n Red Wirebound Professional Notebooks with recycled paper.

Use recycled stationery.

Organise your stationery with this Fellowes Earth Organiser Tray made of recycled compressed fibre board.

Put your recycling into a recycled bin.

Calculate how much money you save by buying recycled on a recycled solar powered calculator.

Address mailshots with recycled address labels.

And finally, print on recycled paper, but only when you have to.

As we get ready to renovate our new home, my husband and I are spending more and more time trawling around reclamation yards looking for materials for our green masterpiece, and getting really excited about reclaimed and recycled products available for both the building work, and the work of decorating and furnishing our house.

This reclaimed wine rack caught my eye, I think it’s pretty groovy, quite unusual in the way it holds the bottles, and just the perfect place to store our organic wine collection.   It’s double sided, taking 30 bottles, and made from recycled reclaimed wood.  It stores the bottles at a slight upturn to ensure corks are kept wet for good keeping.  It’s 70cm high x 40cm x 15cm deep when closed.

With the UK being the world’s biggest wine importer (over 1.6 billion litres a year) it makes sense to stop the importing of individual bottles into the country in an effort to cut waste (we’re importing 630,000 tonnes of packaging along with the wine).  Instead, if wine is imported in bulk and then bottled in the UK in lighter weight bottles made out of recycled UK glass, we have the opportunity to reduce the weight of what’s being transported (fewer carbon emissions and monetary savings), as well as using locally recycled glass (closing the loop).

The good news is that WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) have had tremendous success with this project, and have kept over 20,000 tonnes - equivalent to over 3,600 African elephants - of glass out of the UK by filling over 115 million recycled local glass bottles right here.  This delivers both environmental and commercial benefits. [source: WRAP]

You can help close the recycling loop by buying recycled glass products too.

Photo credit: TheLizardQueen

Earth Day is just a few days away, and I’ve been thinking about what I can do to mark the day.

Here are some of the ideas I’ve come up with:

1. Take a hike with my children.

2. Buy a composter and water-butt for my new house.

3. Change all the lightbulbs in our new house to CFLs.

4. Plant a tree.

5.  Make a recycled cardboard laptop case.

Tell us what you’re doing for Earth Day.  And if you’re a Twitter-bug, be sure to add the #earthtweet hash tag to your Earth Day Tweets.

Photo credit: woodleywonderworks

The beginning of the English summer holds so much promise.  Tiny green things are coming up everywhere and there’s so much potential to make your lifestyle greener too.

Get out into the garden and plant yourself some food (you can do this even if you don’t have a garden), or even a tree.

Equip yourself with a homemade recycled tyre trug,

Light your garden with the power of the sun.

Install a water butt.

Start composting.

If you don’t have a garden, why not find out about getting an allotment?

Growing your own food can save you loads of money every month.

Photo credit: Robert S Donovan

If you’ve been putting off going green because it’s too expensive, now’s your chance to save BIG and get onto that greener path.  Pricegrabber is offering FREE DELIVERY on everything.

Cut your carbon footprint with a bicycle.

Charge your electronic devices with a solar charger.

Switch to energy saving bulbs.

Buy organic whenever possible.

Buy recycled to close the recycling loop.

There’s nothing like a rainy long weekend to get me in the mood for crafting, happily indoors with the pitter-patter of rain on the windows.  I’ve been taking a look at CRAFT, who have just won an award in Treehugger’s 1st annual Best of Green Awards for being the Best Crafting Blog.  They’ve got some brilliant recycling and repurposing crafty projects just right for this time of year (i.e. Spring, Easter…)

How-To: Refashion a T-Shirt into a Halter Top

How-To: Recycle Baby Socks Into Bunnies, Chicks and Eggs

Stuffed Bunny Pattern

If you’re not feeling all that crafty, never fear, you can still do your bit for the planet by buying recycled goods.  There are more recycled goods than you could imagine right here at Pricegrabber.  Take a look!

I certainly hope not, but you will if you don’t take action.  That’s right.  It has recently emerged that the average person in the UK does get through 13,000 in their lifetime.  Isn’t that horrendous?  But it just gets scarier:  in 2008 9.9 million plastic bags were distributed, that’s enough bags to fill 188 Olympic swimming pools, or stretch to the moon and back 7 times [source: edie].  The UK government are so shocked by these statistics that they’re going to do something about it in the form of a campaign encouraging us to re-use our plastic bags.  But, is that taking it far enough?

You can do more, by not taking plastic bags in the first place, and choosing a reusable bag that is not only made from something else that would have ended up in landfill somewhere.  So using recycled re-usable bags are just about as green as it gets.  To that end, you can buy one of these gorgeous bags, or you can save your pounds and make your own out of something that you already have.

Photo credit: Zainub

Putting one of these lovely recycled glass hand soap dispensers in your bathroom will not only brighten up the room, but make it greener too.  Not only because the glass is recycled, but because with a lovely reusable dispenser like this, you can buy your hand soap in bulk and save on all those plastic bottles that the soap usually comes in.  There’s the added bonus of saving money in the long run too, because buying in bulk saves lots.  Good for the planet, good for your wallet.  It’s a real win-win situation.

The government wants the tourist industry to green up their act, because we won’t have a beautiful country or planet to enjoy if they don’t.  Tourism minister Barbara Follett launched a new sustainable tourism framework for England last week saying: “All of us must try to behave in a more environmentally responsible way and the tourism industry is no exception. If we value the future of our world and if we want to protect our country’s unique tourism offer for future generations, we must take sustainability seriously and not see it just as an add-on luxury.

“There are already many businesses doing exemplary work in this area but more must to do so and soon. We have to challenge our thinking about what is on offer and how businesses are run. This will not be easy in difficult economic times, but a sustainable approach can be good for business too.

The new framework sets out “six key challenges” for the tourism sector to make it sustainable economically and ecologically.  They are:

• cutting waste, energy consumption and water use, recycling more and improving buildings
• tackling the impact of tourism transport (getting us onto public transport rather than travelling by car)
• improving the quality of holidays and making them accessible to everyone
• improving the quality of tourism jobs
• enhancing community prosperity and quality of life
• cutting the seasonality of demand

You too can do your bit by making your travel choices greener.  Offset your carbon emissions.  Choose your destination responsibly.  Leave only footprints and take only photographs.  And on the subject of photographs, if you’re going to be spending your holiday in the rugged outdoors with your camera, you might like to take a look at this Lowepro recycled backpack that offers adjustable comfort along with great camera protection.