Photo by Scott Lidell

Christmas time can be a very wasteful time of year. So how can you try to be a little more eco-friendly without spoiling all the fun this festive season?

1. Buy local food produce for your Christmas dinner

This year try to buy as much of your Christmas dinner ingredients from local farms. If you can purchase a locally bred turkey, locally grown Brussel sprouts and potatoes you’ll be making a big step towards being more eco-friendly this Christmas. And you might find the food tastes better as locally produced food has a lower carbon footprint because it isn’t shipped in from abroad.

2. Go organic this Christmas

Imagine how delicious an organic Christmas dinner would be. Organic food is grown without the use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides that harm the environment. The soil is healthier and the local wildlife benefits from a pesticide free environment. Organic food is healthier because organically grown crops absorb natural nutrients from the organic soil. So this Christmas see if you can go organic for a great tasting, healthier Christmas dinner.

3. Buy eco-friendly gifts for your friends and family

An eco-friendly Christmas gift is a great present. Eco-friendly gifts tend to be interesting and quirky, which is great at Christmas when people want a nice surprise to unwrap. But not only that’ eco-friendly gifts remind your friends about the importance of sustainable living.

4. Go for a walk down to your local pub

This Christmas leave the car at home, wrap up warmly and take a stroll with your family to the local pub for a Christmas drink. A walk after a hefty Christmas dinner is a good way to relieve that bloated feeling.

5. Recycle your wrapping paper

The temptation at Christmas, after opening the presents, can be to just chuck all the ripped up paper in the bin. This Christmas make an effort to remove the adhesive tape and recycle the used wrapping paper. It’s easier than you think and if everyone did it, it could make a big difference.

6. Got a lot of leftovers? Compost them

You’ll probably have a lot of leftover food that can’t be eaten at Christmas time. Did you know that most of it can be composted and used in the garden? With a discreet and self contained kitchen composter you don’t need to leave the kitchen to compost the leftovers you scrape off your dinner plates. It can be kept in the kitchen ready to access with ease.

Will you make an effort to be more eco-friendly this Christmas? Please let us know in the comments.

Here are some more of our favourite eco-tips with our responses, this time to do with an eco friendly lifestyle! We have many things here from picking fruit, not taking the car,  re-using shredded paper and encouraging children to recycle. So have a look and once again a BIG thank you to everyone who submitted these tips to our quoits competition. Simply click the link below to view them! Next and finally on friday we’ll post up our best gardening eco tips. For the meantime, click the link below and  enjoy!

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Red butterfly on a buddleia flower

As recently reported in BBC news there has been a worrying drop in bee numbers in the UK. The same is also happening for butterflies, as reported by The Guardian. So we need to do all we can to help their numbers as they have an important job in pollenating flowers around the country. And of course, without bees there would be no honey!

Grow bee-friendly plants and wildflowers in your home or school garden to attract bees and butterflies. Some of the best plants for bees and butterflies are:

Lavender
This plant with its purple flowers is well known for its relaxing, sweet scent, and is widely used in aromatherapy and is an essential oil. It is also extremely easy to grow in almost all areas, but prefers a sunny sheltered position in well drained soil. Bees and butterflies both love it. Grow some today!

Buddleia ( “Butterfly Bush” )
You can see this tall plant growing in many places such as along railway lines and empty grounds. It has long, purple flowers and can grow tall (So make sure it doesn’t get too overgrown!). You will be rewarded with beautiful cabbage, red admiral and other butterflies and bumble bees who love its sweet scent. Extremely easy to grow.

Hollyhocks
Another Bee favourite! These can grow as tall as sunflowers with one very thick stem full of lots of flowers in summer.  Again very easy to grow.

Jasmine & Honeysuckle
The Jasmine bush has plenty of small white flowers, the honeysuckle has rounded clusters of pink or yellow flowers. Both have  a great scent bees (and you!) will love.

Stinging nettles
They can be a pest, and you will notice if you touch one without gloves! But they are the perfect place for many butterflies to lay their eggs, including comma, tortoiseshell and red admirals.

Remember when you see bees and butterflies, watch but don’t disturb them. Follow our tip about making a wild corner too, and with these plants in your garden you’ll be helping these friendly insects to survive in the UK.

PS- our competition results will be announced soon!

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!

If you have some free space in your school grounds or garden, why not create a wild corner for insects, plantlife and amphibians to live? Butterflies, dragonflies, frogs and other creatures will be fascinating for children to watch in a safe environment and a wild corner can be very beneficial to the local environment too.

Reserve a sunny space in a quiet and undisturbed area so to allow plants to grow naturally undisturbed. Plant campion and rosebay willowherb plants to attract moths and insects, which birds can feed on. Soon you will have a wild corner, and when it has become established you may see stinging nettles and brambles appear. Butterflies and moths lay their eggs on stinging nettles and bramble bushes. Birds also feed on blackberries made by the brambles. See which other plants you can identify and which animals live on them.

Depending on where you live, the plants and animals living in your wild corner will be different. Always allow nature to take its course, and see which wildlife you can recognise, while helping to improve the environment in your school or garden. For more information on making a wild corner in your garden, see this BBC link.