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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]

I had the pleasure of spending the past weekend at the Latitude Festival, on the beautiful Henham Park Estate, in Southwold, Suffolk. It was a superb festival, to say the least, and the sun shone all weekend, so the wellies stayed firmly in the rucksack, which was nice after the muddy mess that was Glastonbury.

What really made me smile this weekend was that the festival has made a huge effort to reduce its impact on the environment by introducing a number of new measures, some of which are just genius. The biggest change was in the way the bars worked. Obviously festival goers are a thirsty bunch, and go through a fair few pints of beer / cider / lager / whatever. One of the biggest problems with this is that it is normally served in single-use plastic glasses which end up strewn around the site making a mess and causing problems for the litter-pickers. By introducing a re-usable, more durable plastic glass, for which they asked a £2 deposit, the organisers ensured that the beautiful parkland was not blighted by this most common of problems, and that less plastic ended up in landfill. Why it hasn’t been done before, I don’t know.

The other big change was the introduction of a three bin system for waste. Festival-goers were asked to split there waste into ‘Recyclable’, ‘Compostable, and ‘Neither’, a system which was well adhered to, and by the end of the weekend the ‘Neither’ bins were by far the most empty. Another scheme to bring back next year then.

Transport was also looked at, and recognising the fact that public transport is one of the most environmentally friendly ways to get to the festival, a day-ticket holder campsite was introduced, which allowed those who weren’t camping all weekend to camp for one night, and use public transport to get home the next day, as evening buses around Southwold aren’t all that regular.

All in all, Latitude seems very keen to promote green issues, and the steps taken this year will no doubt be adopted by other Mean Fiddler festivals in the future, and I look forward to them being the norm, rather than the exception.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vS9ub_9WUs[/youtube]

Found this neat little video all about fair trade while doing some work on a section of EthicalSuperstore.com

People Tree is a fair trade and ecological fashion company, selling clothing and accessories.

They’re really into organic cotton farming, and they make the dinosaur suit and the cuddly bunny (not Frank) that I featured in the green babies post the other week.

Anyway, the video is really cool, so watch it. It’s by a guy called Chris Haughton who made it into Time magazine’s Style & Design 100 for being one of “today’s most influential designs”.

It’s really great to see this guy listed alongside people like Jonathan Ive (Apple iPod and iPhone), James Dyson (the Dyson vacuum cleaner) and Paul Smith (all manner of cool stuff).