I was lucky enough to be part of this show on coffee cups. The vast majority of which are not recycled due to the PE liner. For years it was considered okay to mix a low percentage in to a batch of cardboard. But over time this has become a real problem. We use 7,000,000 coffee cups a day in the UK. That's 2,500,000,000 a year. The vast majority of which go to landfill. This is a clip from the BBC1 programme that looked at this problem.
We talk to you about the biodegradable bags and the materials that are used to create them and whether they really are a better option.
We will be revisiting the compost heap and checking the progress of the bags every 12 weeks to see how long it really takes for these bags to break down, could this really be done at home whilst bringing back lots of these bags every single week from the shops?
We revisit the biodegradable bags for the first time since burying them in the compost heap 12 weeks ago - Do you think the bags will have changed much over the end of winter?
We revisit the biodegradable bags that we buried into the compost heap 24 weeks ago - How much of the bag do you think will be left?
It was never about the straws. The biggest impact of a cocktail is whats in it. Growing, processing and transporting the ingredients is the greatest impact. So drink it all up. For those cocktails with a foam an egg white is used to make the foam with the yolk usually being thrown away (I found this out the hard way doing waste audits of bars). An egg has a carbon footprint of around 200-320 g. The same as four bananas. A free-range egg is 25% worse. So how can we reduce the footprint? Using chickpea water. This little video shows how.
How do we make things better? By making better things. This short TEDx talk outlines why we need to do things differently.
This excerpt from Rip off Food looks at packaging and over-packaging. It's a few years old but not much has changed - including Gloria who was ace.