Archive for March, 2008

On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. Cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv, will hold events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.

Google have turned out the lights. Let’s do the same tonight.

No, actually, they’re not. Sevin Coskun’s entry to Treehugger’s Greener Gadgets Design Competition is remarkable in both it’s simplicity, fuctionality and message, but you have to wonder what would motivate someone to install a washing machine in their bathroom… or a toilet in their kitchen.

The Washup combines a washing machine with a toilet, with the grey water from the machine repurposed for flushing the loo. As the average toilet uses 8 litres of water per flush, and most people use the toilet an average of 35 times per week (according to USwitch), the water savings potential is huge.

Here at How Ethical! we can’t help but think it’s all a little impractical, and can’t see many people going out of their way to have this fitted, but the promotion of grey water reuse is commendable, and with a few design tweaks (like plumbing the components into different rooms!) this could be a winner! [via Treehugger]

The acquisition of Green & Black's by Cadbury-Schweppes in 2005 was, and still is, a tricky question for all of us who want to do the right thing in what we buy.

On the positive side Green and Blacks has pioneered and developed a huge range of organic and some Fairtrade products and made them available to a mass market. While it was privately owned, they were clearly a "star" in ethical trading terms.

The downside of the acquisition was two-fold. Now the profits would go to Cadburys – a company who has so far refused to take seriously the environmentally friendly and fair trade aspects of its own supply chains.

We made a decision after the acquisition to wait and see what the impact was.
If we felt that the corporate Cadburys influence was having a negative impact (e.g. dumbing down products etc) on Green & Black's then we would stop selling. However, there was always the chance that influence would go the other way with Green & Black's approaches becoming influential on the whole of Cadburys products.

The evidence to date is neutral in my personal view. There is no perceptible change in Cadbury's corporate practice and Green & Black's's influence on the organisation seems negligible to date. However, there have been some positive outcomes from an ethical product perspective. Green & Black's has more working capital and seasonal products seem especially well resourced – this year's range of Easter eggs, for example, is stunning.

So why are we still selling Green & Black's?

The key factor that tipped us over the edge to maintain the product sales was Green & Black's long term relationship with poor and marginalised cocoa and sugar producers around the world.

It seems very unfair to penalise the fairtrade cocoa producers in Belize just because a corporate board room change in the UK.

We'll keep watching Green & Black's to see what happens. We always appreciate your feedback, so if you want to let us know what you think, leave us a comment below.

Just a quick follow up to last week’s post on the Green Computing Debate hosted online by The Register.

The debate brought up some excellent points, and thankfully managed to (by and large) avoid cliche. Survey results presented by Dale Vile of Freeform Dynamics showed that despite significant growth in eco-awareness, many businesses are still ignoring ecological concerns in their day to day work. Sadly, greenwashing is still prevalent in many workplaces, when a true greening of the business could be just as straightforward.

Representatives of both Dell and Intel showed what they are currently doing to ensure their product is the greenest of them all, and their future plans look very promising indeed, both concentrating on better power management systems. Albert Esser, of Dell, looked at why better power management systems are important, whilst Kevin O’Donovan of Intel explained how these systems might be implemented. All in all, they were two very promising presentations.

Tech kit gets old quick. We all know that. Louise Richards of Computer Aid International spent fifteen very interesting minutes looking at possible solutions to the endless cycle of buy-use-dump-replace. A highly recommended presentation.

The whole debate has been archived on The Register, so if you fancy taking a look, head over to The Register Green Computing Debate, and take in some of the presentations.