Overpackaged: the tea edition...

My friend Greg B, who is a photographer and designer, sent me some photos he’d taken of the most over-packaged tea I’ve ever seen. I put them in a little slideshow so I could share it with you - I didn’t want to be making the boggle-eyes face all by myself. Like a lot of Go Greener readers, Greg loves tea and likes trying new types. But as he pointed out to me, tea only needs to be protected from air...

Uni-taskers...

My theme for this year is “reduce” - I want to reduce waste, save water, and get more energy efficient in my home. I’m also working on reducing clutter. I’m happier with a clean, tidy house, and that’s a lot easier if it isn’t full of stuff I’ve bought on a whim. As part of my reducing project, I’ve been reading the Unclutterer blog. They’ve got a lot of good ideas...

Coal - a dirty business...

Did you see last night’s Four Corners episode, A Dirty Business, about coal mining in the Hunter Valley? If you missed it, it’s well worth chasing it up on their website or watching it on ABC’s iView. It was about the terrible health problems faced by people in the Hunter Valley who have gradually had coal mines surround their towns. Doctors have noticed that respiratory disease in the area is well above...

Manufacturing a scientific scandal...

Photo credit: GetUp How many of you read or heard about Clive Hamilton’s article on climate contrarians in Australia? It was a 5-part piece that was published at the ABC’s Unleashed site a couple of weeks ago. I thought I’d linked to it here but it looks like I missed it after all. 1: Bullying, lies and the rise of climate denial 2: Who is orchestrating the cyber-bullying? 3: Think tanks, oil money and...

We trust the foxes to take care of the henhouse...

Photo credit: abc.net.au You might remember my previous post about the Gorgon gas development on Barrow Island: it’s a Class A nature reserve and the Gorgon group of oil and gas multinationals reckon they can drill for gas there, store their carbon dioxide under the ground, and not cause any environmental damage. Last week David Gravina linked to an article about the startup of the Gorgon project. WA premier Colin...

Spoofing the Coal Association’s ads...

The Australian Coal Association is running an ad in areas that have close election results and a lot of mining jobs. It’s a supposedly heartfelt plea to the government to “cut emissions, not jobs”. But that kind of oh-so-serious advert is always a challenge to Aussies: how soon can we make fun of it? I know of 3 spoofs versions of the ads doing the rounds already. The first two I heard about via Rooted....

Gorgon gas field...

Photo credit: abc.net.au The Gorgon gas project is going ahead: it’s a billion-dollar gas mine, drilled into the North-West sea floor, with the product pumped to Barrow Island (a Class-A nature reserve) so it can be compressed to a liquid and exported. Barrow Island is like Australia’s version of the Galapagos islands. It’s home to 15 mammals, 7 marine mammals, 110 bird species, 54 species of reptile...

Fonterra contributing to rainforest destruction...

Photo credit: Greenpeace New Zealand Long-term readers will remember when a bunch of us wrote to Fonterra about their rather stupid “Win a Hummer” choc-milk promotion for Brownes, one of their subsidiary companies. At the time, they responded with details of their efforts to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in production since 1998, to prove that they care about the environment. But this looks pretty...

Maybe we need a new law...

You might have heard about the Australian Conservation Foundation asking the ACCC to investigate the claims by corporations that an emissions trading scheme would cost so much they’d be forced to go out of business, or give up thousands of jobs. The corporations were telling politicians and the media that it’d devastate their profits, but were telling shareholders that in fact, they’d be just fine and...

Glass and plastic and imports, oh my...

I took this photo on the weekend, in a big department store in the city. The more greenie I become, the more stuff like this disturbs me. In just a few metres, we’ve got water from: Australia, in plastic bottles (top right, middle left) Australia, in glass bottles (middle right) Fiji, in plastic bottles (top left) Italy, in glass bottles (bottom right) Norway, in designer glass bottles All just in case you get...