Clear Product Origin Labeling

Just bought from Tesco, Daily Care Toothpaste. What I didn't realise until I got home and read the small print was that it had come all the way from China!

My usual Colgate is made in the EU (Poland). I would rather buy UK materials+production, but there don't seem to be any left (we used to have a toothpaste and even Brillo pad down the road).

Therefore, I put out a call for legislation to have compulsory labeling of:

• Product origin in country name in large letting, equal size to product name/description.
• The origin must not be disguised ("Scottish" Salmon produced in Russia, packaged in Scotland etc)
• Km from the top destinations (as a product made in Beijing is 3,700 Km from Tibet).

Eco driving from 28 to 41 mpg

Having just travelled a monster 2500 mile trip around many destinations in Europe in my Audi I am pleased to say I managed to adjust my driving style and cut my petrol consumption by 32%. In the UK I was achieving around 28 mpg (10 km per litre), with my new approaches I increased that to 41 mpg (14.5 km per litre)!! So over my 2500 miles this saved me £128 pounds (1280 km saved, 10 km per litre at £1.2)

Top tips:

1. Don't leave the engine idle, turn it off if in stationary traffic.
2. Cruse in 6th gear, watch the revs and take it easy.
3. Follow lorries in the slow lane.
4. Don't overtake cars to gain 20 metres.
5. Roll down hills, take out of gear and watch the engine on revs saved ;)
6. Coast up to lights that are on red, rather than racing and then braking. If you're lucky they will change to green and you will have saved momentum.
7. Deal with motorways which are racing, then braking, then racing along again by cruising and evening out the traffic flow. Saves the brakes as well as fuel!

Driving a UK car in Europe on the right side of the road is quite easy actually, I was surprised, the hard bit is usually positioning the car between the line markings in a LHD car, but as RHD I didn't have any probs at all. Overtaking a parked bus is bit harder as view is obscured looking left through. It is a shame Germany does not have cats-eyes on any of its autobanns, especially as some are not lit!

The BBC has recently published an eco-driving article.

If the UK switched to drive on the same side as Europe it would make sense..

Swaffham Wind Turbine Norfolk

If you're interested in eco-power generation, the Swaffham Wind Turbine in Norfolk operated by Ecotricity with the EcoTech Visitor Centre on-site is definitely worth a visit!

Be careful to book though, as the opening times are pretty erratic, like no bank-holiday opening! and only the last Sunday in the month is open.

The EcoTech Visitor Centre phone number is 01760 726 100, but they often don't staff it or have an answering machine with opening times either. Worth a visit if you can manage to book.

Too much packaging

I'm sure everyone is noticing just how much superfluous packaging food and products now come in. Now rather than taking all that packaging off individually wrapped apples in a larger bag at home, imagine if we took all the packaging off while still in the supermarket. Imagine if we left it all there neatly placed in black sacks, and took the food home in our reusable shopping bags. Supermarkets would have to hire skips at great expense to take away the packaging, and would soon stop buying produce from supplies who over-packed their food ;)

Saving Energy - Mobile phone chargers etc

We can all do our bit to save energy by switching off appliances when they are not in use. However, what we really need is for there to be an easily accessible switch to do this. The switch needs to be a physical switch to stop the current flowing, as even devices on standby still consume energy. Mobile phone chargers and other transformers don't yet have a switch, so we need to switch them off at the wall. I don't know about you, but my study is crammed with so much stuff that getting to a socket or 4-way adaptor would require some serious crawling!

Consider the example of my friend James' Laptop, it's a Lenovo ThinkPad, even when it is off the Ethernet and power LEDs are lit, the router LED is also lit. Wake On LAN is disabled, so there is no good reason that a certain amount of current being used for these functions when it is off. What we need is a new type of physical switch to turn laptops on and off, one which when pressed completes a magnetic relay circuit, which keeps the connection established. When the laptop is shutdown the relay magnet is switched off which disconnects the power completely.

Laptops have a special need to charge their internal batteries, a couple of ideas to cover that area:

1. The power transformer needs a physical switch on the side of it.
2. The battery monitoring/charging circuit could be the only part of the laptop which is using any current when the laptop is off.
3. The power transformer could be integrated into the laptop as their mass is so tiny these days.
   

In addition, appliances which have clocks like DVRs could be designed to have a battery backed clock so we can switch them off when they're not in use.

When you think of how many appliances each of us have on standby, or even off but using power like the laptop you see that every little change helps us save energy and thus the environment. There could easily be 10 Million mobile phone chargers and laptops plugged in and using energy as we speak!