Of course we would like your garden waste to be composted as much as possible, but if you are one of many who are lighting a bonfire on fireworks night we recommend you follow these simple steps so stay safe and minimise your impact on the environment.

• If you are lighting a bonfire, firstly check to see that no animals have made a home inside the pile of bonfire materials such as hedgehogs.
• Try to use as much dry wood and paper and as little wet leaves and green plants as possible. Wet materials cause the fire to burn less efficiently and produce smoke. Heavy smoke produced by damp bonfires will pollute the air and can be a hazard to health and the environment. Always be careful the fire does not go out of control.
• Never burn materials such as plastic, paint, rubber, aerosols or other similar household rubbish. Toxic fumes can be released posing a serious health hazard and can also poison the ground afterwards.
• The following days, plough the resulting bonfire ash into the ground to help increase the quality of your garden soil.
• Don’t leave a fire unattended and never site it close to hedges, sheds, trees or buildings.

Remember, always follow the fireworks code, and stay safe. Pets and animals can become very scared by loud bangs. Give any of your pets a place to hide indoors to minimise noise and don’t use loud fireworks.

We have more of your great eco-tips: This time, gardening! Please click the link below to see our favourites.  Thank you for all your entries! This finishes our eco tips competition, we would like to say a big thank you to all who entered and we loved reading all your tips. We hope you will follow some of the tips you posted!

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Quoits. It’s a fun game for all the family. Grab your sandals, get into the garden and enjoy the tickle of grass on your toes. You can play quoits in your office, on the beach, on top of an extremely obese elephant, at school and even at the park — but make sure the hobos don’t steel your quoits set for firewood.

Enter the competition

We’re giving away three eco-friendly quoits sets to whoever sends in the most interesting ‘eco-tips’ — providing they live in the UK. So head over to Pea Green Things now and send in your best tip. That’s right, you too could be just like this idealic family, pictured. You’ve got until the 12th of July so best hurry up.

We’ll email winners and announce the winning eco-tips right here on Go Green. We’re after interesting tips and things that make us laugh. Bear in mind I’m on the panel of judges so best make the tips good.

It’s unbelievable but true that 786 million trees are felled each year to cope with the world’s rising demand for paper products, and the processing that has to be done uses a staggering 98kg of resources for 1kg of paper.  And we know how many student exercise books are gone through after pages and pages of homework and doodles!  So, some clever research has been done to find an alternative, sustainable paper source, and after much tiring research books made from sugar canes are now being produced. The materials, known as “Bagasse” or simply “BE” are made with crushed sugar cane stalks, and are a waste product from the sugar making process.  So not only does this save land  from being deforested,  but there is less need for wood based paper and less wastage from the sugar making process.  It also takes much less energy to produce bagasse paper than wood-based paper.

Surely there must be something wrong, but we can’t think of a thing. Don’t think the quality will suffer either! The sheets are 80gsm, and require less bleaching than conventional paper too. They look and feel just like “normal” paper, but with the knowledge that the environmental impact is  much lower. And, from the folks at The Consortium think it’s such a great idea that they’re selling them at exactly the same price as the standard exercise books.  We even think that soon they will replace them completely!

For a press release go here. Your kids may be writing on the same material as you put in your tea, but we don’t recommend this as a sugar substitute.  Remember this stuff usually gets thrown away! And if you’re a teacher, switching to BE books is easy.  We’re sure you’ll find the books so sweet you’ll never turn back.  (groan!)

psst- did you know we have a Twitter account? go here!

Our warehouse and distribution team have recently come up with a simple, innovative and highly effective method for dramatically reducing packaging materials. The result? We’ve managed to reduce the number of plastic bags used in our packaging by an astonishing 3.5 million per year.

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