Photo by msmail’s

You know the saying “the older the better”? The guys at Time To Change came up with a fun and green variation to the theme. We’re not talking about wine in this case, but fridges and freezers!

The idea is simple. Seeking the UK’s oldest working fridge and giving the winner a new energy efficient model. This is to highlight their campaign to encourage the replacement of 15.4 million old, energy-hungry, domestic appliances still in use in the UK.

Time to Change are running the competition again this year after a couple in their 80s won it with a 54 year old guzzler in 2008! This year their mission is to find an even older fridge to pension off.

The competition closes on the 28th of February so you still have time to visit your dearest aunties and great-aunties and try to find that old guzzler.

Some facts and figures: If we all replace the 15.4 million outdated appliances still in use in the UK, we could save enough energy to power 1 million homes.

And if you wonder wheter it’s greener to hang on to your old fridge, check out Time 2 Change’s Myths and Facts.

Today is Italy National Energy Saving Day. “M’illumino di meno” is a great initiative at its 4th year that was initially launched by the guys at Caterpillar.

Participating is simple:  just switch off lights and all unnecessary eletrical equipment from 6pm to 7.30pm today (GMT+1)

A reason to be proud of being Italian, that is not just fashion, pizza and mandolino!

More at Energy Saving Day

If you live in the UK you are most likely to have been hit by the impressive snowfall. While enjoying some home comfort, I can’t help but listening to the green warrior within me emerging. Snow means cold, snow means water, that is, free cold and free water. What can I possibly do with snow, other than making snowmen (yes, I made that one!) and joining snowball fights in the street?

So here are my tips:

1. Put your fridge on holiday for a couple of days and save energy by moving your food in a bucket full of fresh snow. If you can safely put your stuff outside the window or on to the balcony, even better.

2. By turning off your fridge you can also perform some maintenance that will help keep it up and running more efficiently for longer. Turn it off, leave doors open for a few hours and let the ice melt inside the refrigerator. Click here for more on how to clean and defrost a fridge.

3. Fill as many buckets, pails and containers with snow and let it melt slowly for use in your home in the next few days, as it was non-drinkable water. You can use it to flush the toilet, water your plants, or clean the floor.

Have you got any others?

Photo by Lenore M. Edman, www.evilmadscientist.com

Sometime you have to step backfrom your standpoint and see things as they really are. I would be keen to believe that nobody would ever leave the lights on 24/7 in the office, not these days, not when climate change is said to be on top of every business agendas. Yet the sad truth is, this is still not the case. How many times you do walk around in the night and see loads of empty office buildings, all lighted up, screens on, as it was the busiest time of the day?

Does it just come down to energy management or is it a general behavioural issue? There are so many ways you can drive energy efficiency in an office environment, like occupancy/daylight sensors for the lighting system, timers, more efficient equipments. But how far one should go down the road of automation?

There are gadgets out there that can even remind you to turn off your screen when you leave the office. To me that equals to: extra cost for the gadget (yes, extra, as I don’t think it will never pay back. People would just forget what that little funny button is there for); extra carbon costs for all the embedded energy in the product manufacturing (including shipping and disposal); and ultimately that means considering people as monkeys, not even capable of remembering to switch off their monitors. Sorry, actually monkeys would do that if properly instructed.

The big question: how do we balance between investing in technology and investing in people?

Photo by jilldoughtie

Since I’ve started using baking soda for my home cleaning I practically spend no money for cleaning products. If you buy on bulk, it gets almost ridiculous how cheap it can be compared to how much money and chemicals people waste for householde products! To boost baking soda’s cleaning power I just combine it with either cheap white vinegar or lemon juice…and the magic begins! It smells good, it absorbs bad odours, it’s not harmful for humans and the environment and most of all you can use baking soda for literally ANYTHING! From moisturizing your body to keeping your cat litter fresh, from making your bath tub shine to bleaching your clothing, everything absolutely naturally and chemicals-free.

One of the most comprehensive resources on the uses of baking soda is the Baking Soda Book. Download it here

It’s free and easy to use. The Energy Star online calculator is available on the European Union website. Energy rates and consumption patterns are customizable as well as the type of equipment, printers, modem…

You’ll be amazed to learn that the difference between desktop and laptop in terms of emissions is huge, some 165 kg of CO2 per year!!! And remember, if stand by is not the right power management approach, shutting down might still not be the right answer. Unplugging is the only way to zero consumption when the pc is switched off.

Use prompts to remind yourself to unplug your pc, like a little tag on the last spot you see when you shut it down reading “UNPLUG IT“.

ecoCampLondon will be on Saturday 29 November, from 9.00am to 6.30pm, hosted by UnLtd, the foundation for social entrepreneurs.

ecoCampLondon is a BarCamp about the environment and sustainability. Unlike conventional conferences, BarCamps employ a highly democratic and user-generated meeting methodology, where the participants’ level of engagement and sense of ownership make all the difference.

The inspiring principle of ecoCampLondon is that the planet belongs to us and we want to bring the discussion back to those opinionated people who are craving for a place where their ideas, projects, discussions can be valued by others and eventually brought forward.

It’s one of the few explicit rules of BarCamp that presentations shouldn’t be prescheduled. At ecoCampLondon participants will have the opportunity to propose a topic, pick a slot on the timetable and facilitate discussion among people that have decided to have their say on that topic. If you are not learning from or contributing to the discussion, you just use your feet and walk away to some other session.

Free tickets will be released from the 31^st October

When: Saturday, 29 November 2008, 9am-6pm
Where: UnLtd – London, UK
Who: 50 environmental professionals, social entrepreneurs, developers, marketers…PEOPLE

A post I wrote after the first edition of ecoCamp ever, in March 08. It was on my old blog, I just paste it here for my new readers and to kick start my next posts on ecoCampLondon.

” Yesterday, March 29, it finally happened: ecoCamp, a BarCamp on environmental and sustainability issues, the first of its kind in Italy, a great success for the entire community.

I organised ecoCamp together with Julius, a blogger and event planner specialized in BarCamps and Open Space Technology. It was a real challenge to host a BarCamp in Conversano, a small town in Southern Italy. But we decided to believe in it and to be brave. And it paid off! More than 80 people attended the event. If you consider that the largest BarCamps in the world usually count 300 attendees, well, it’s been a remarkable success. Not only for the number of attendees, but also (and more importantly) in terms of the quality of the event and its outcomes.

ecoCamp hosted 10 sessions over 5 hours. Each sessions produced a document where participants had to write down what they discussed, why, and what conclusions they drawn. These documents are now going to end up in a final doc called “ecoCamp @ world”, which will be shared and made accessible by everybody for free.

I believe that the BarCamp formula works perfectly when it comes to the environment and sustainability. Everybody in the industry talks about empowerment and the importance of building the capacity of people to act upon their knowledge. ecoCamp empowered people to bring about change. All ecoCampers have been given the responsibility of their actions during the event and after, they now feel empowered to spread the word and work towards making an ecoCamp 2 happen. I strongly encourage everybody to promote or attend a BarCamp, which is more or less the same thing. I invite you to find out more about the ecoCamp case study here. “

1. Top three non-work websites :

• Treehugger
• Instructables
• Eco-chick

2. Three favourite cocktails (I don’t really like cocktails, they sound so mid 90s - will start a new meme with favourite wines next time!) anyway:

• Mojito
• Caipiroska
• Frozen Margarita

3. Top three karaoke songs:

• O sole mio!
• Faith - George Michael
• Somebody to love - Queen

And now I pass it on to: Elodie, Emma and Jure

I was at SocialMediaCamp London a couple of weeks ago, having interesting conversations about social media. In the middle of a session my mind started mumbling an idea: “social media, online applications, networking…what has this got to do with the environment? How can I use all that for a green cause?”

That’s why BarCamps are so great. You happen to have a bunch of bright minds handy, you can engage them with your ideas, and eventually come up with something that is more than an idea!

My session was called ‘Twitter for the environment.’ Pretty self-explanatory. Thanks to the contribution of fellow barcampers, @mybit is now live on twitter. It is a simple application that allows people to tweet their green bits, tell others what you’ve done to contribute to the environment, inspire people to do their bit.

If you are already using twitter, here is what you need to do to start spreading your green bits:

1. start following @mybit
2. send a direct tweet to mybit in the third person, e.g. “d mybit didn’t take her car to work”
3. @mybit will retweet it as “@..yourtwittername.. didn’t take her car to work”