Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: cleaning products, dtergent, Eco, Ecover, Environment, Green, Vegan Society, washing detergent, Washing powder, Water fleas
Although I’d never heard of this cleaning agent company before, a flash advert caught my attention on the Guardian website whilst browsing for my daily dose of eco-news. Normally i wouldn’t pay any notice to on-line ads but I decided to pursue this.
Ecover, a Belgian company, was set up in 1980 and uses only natural eco-friendly ingredients to make its detergents and cleaning products. Although it would seem this is just another big-shot company wanting to jump onto the eco bandwagon, Ecover claim they have been ‘trend setters from the very start’ by m,arketing a phosphate-free washing powder ‘even before phosphates were branded as a problem’.
So what’s the catch? Surely someone must have dug out some really horrifically damning dirt (excuse the pun) on these cleaning products. Well, yes, in a way. The best people have come up with is that the products are sometimes tested on water fleas and blood samples from farmed rabbits have been taken in the past. So if you feel empathy for water fleas, this product isn’t for you. Of course, these finding have ruffled the feathers of the Vegan Society who have dropped the product from their certified list. See the argument on Abi’s Hippy Shopper blog.
Could it be? An actual business doing what they can to be kind to the environment without actually doing it for selfish ‘jumping on the eco-bandwagon’ reasons? As for the products themselves, they can be found in most supermarkets across the UK. However, not all products can be found in one store, which is a bit odd. Maybe this is the time Ecover can truly blossom in this ‘eco-aware’ age and I wish them the best of luck. An advert has been made although I’m unsure as to weather this would make British television screens as I’ve only seen it on the internet. Check it out here.
Filed under: Uncategorized
With Britain’s landfill and carbon emission targets to achieve, people are being encouraged to recycle more in their homes and find eco-friendly changes in their everyday lifestyle.
However, all this seems a little pointless when a lot of people still don’t bother to recycle or take bigger steps towards an eco-friendly lifestyle. Some businesses still don’t recycle properly and this is criminal considering the sheer volume of recyclable materials such as paper and glass, that a business generates as waste compared to a typical household.
Working in the back of a restaurant at weekends, I personally throw away around 20 plastic containers in six hours alone because there isn’t anywhere to recycle plastic outback. As just one of around six chefs on a single shift, the total amount of waste that has the potential to be recycled is enormous.
The restaurant however does have a glass recycling facility for the bar. It could be argued that this is a lot simpler anyway, than just binning the glass in bin liners as the glass is easily smashed and broken inside the bag. Out back, there is a cardboard recycling container but this gets full halfway through the night. It isn’t that the staff don’t want to recycle, there just isn’t enough room and on a busy late Saturday night shift, there isn’t enough time to carry a bin full of cleaned and grouped plastics across a busy kitchen to the back of the car park.
Although general advice has been given, it is difficult for some businesses to recycle, then newer, more effective measures must be brought in to help out, not just the meaningless lectures. I’m sure that if a law such as taxes for unrecycled waste was bought in, you can bet that businesses would step up their mark on the recycling issue. However, would this be fair? For instance, restaurants have a lot of waste that can’t be recycled compared to other businesses and households. It’s difficult to decide what is a best and a fair recycling policy for businesses. You can’t help but feel that doing ‘your bit’ at home really isn’t doing anything at all.
