Angela Neustatter

I am one of many who more often than not burble with fury, frustration and a sense of hopelessness after my daily read of the news in the media. And I am a journalist!  So I wonder how much harm this diet of unrelenting bad news does to society’s collective psyche?

II was a prime target when the offer to buy a minimum £50
share in the launch of Positive News was offered as part of a scheme where shareholders also have involvement in the product. Positive News, a high quality colour magazine, is what it says on the tin: journalism dedicated to letting us know the things that are benefitting and enhancing our world, things to celebrate and feel inspired by.

The editorial philosophy is that ‘ good journalism can also be about the good things that are happening. We don’t stop at highlighting a problem but use that as a starting point before asking what’s being done about it. We then investigate solutions critically, moving beyond the hero tale or happy story, to uncover socially relevant insights into what’s going well in the world.’

Positive News is now owned by 1,526 readers, journalists and supporters from 33 countries following a successful crowdfunding campaign. So if, as I do, you think we badly need this kind of media, help support it by subscribing. Without us as punters, as well as shareholders, they cannot survive . (https://www.positive.news)

Search engines do not usually inspire my passion, although I am grateful for their usefulness. However a friend has just put me on to Ecosia (www.ecosia.org) and it gives a delicious frisson of pleasure as I go a-searching.

Ecosia is a web search engine based in Berlin, Germany which donates 80% of its surplus income to non-profit conservation organisations. Researchers at the University of Gottingen decided to lay out why what they do is valuable. ‘The environmental impact of IT is facing increasing public attention. The search engine Ecosia takes advantage of this situation by pursuing a Social Business model. Search engines need electricity to provide their services and indirectly produce CO2. The estimation of greenhouse gas emissions for the average search query using the market leader Google fluctuate between 0.2 g and 10.0 g of CO2. The search engine Ecosia tries to compensate the emissions by donating most of its revenues to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and save rainforest from deforestation.’

Ecosia, along with most search engines, shows ads next to its search results and is paid by partners at Microsoft Bing for every click on a sponsored link. The amount Ecosia earns per click on an ad strongly varies, depending on the competition on the  keyword and the value of what is being advertised. In general, a click on one of the more lucrative keywords (see Wikipedia) may finance multiple trees at a time.

I am not accustomed to linking up the words technology and love in one sentence, but my appreciation of the Smart Cara (www.smartcaraeurope.com) which sits on a work service in my kitchen and in three hours reduces a bin load of food waste to a powdery nutrient rich garden manure, has won my devotion.

I’ve tried composting food but never got beyond having a load of sludgy smelly manure that seems to take up a lot of space. While my council does not collect food waste and even if it did chances are it would end up in landfill.

Once there, it is a killer for the environment. The Love Food website tells how in the UK, we discard a total of almost one million tonnes of food waste – milk, bread ,potatoes and so on, every year .

Our landfills are filling up with rotting food, where it can take many years to degrade completely and meanwhile emits a horrifying amount of methane gas. That’s because in landfills, organic materials, like food scraps, are broken down by bacteria to produce methane. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and it has a warming potential of 21 times that of carbon dioxide. In 2011, for example, the waste sector accounted for 3.1% of total greenhouse gas emissions in the UK .

So imagine if this vast food waste mass could be reduced by up to 90% in just three hours in the place where it is collected, and turned into a powder manure needing no chemicals, so that collection and depositing of waste food is done away with and you have the product for your plants .

It took the team at Smart Cara, a Korean design agency with an environmental brief, ten years to to get from having the lightbulb moment to producing a low-watt electric machine the Smart Cara into which you put your household waste with no need to keep it in a waste container first. Turn it on and after three hours of steam drying and churning, you open the lid and – hey presto! – there is a fine powder ready to be removed. Smart Cara won a Ministry of Trade award in Korea and is now selling in the UK, where it is winning admirers apart from me. The author of a testimonial on Zerowaste Week blog:

“I’ve seen some serious greenwashing in my time of living a sustainable lifestyle. But sometimes a product comes along that really makes you sit up and take notice “.

So where is the catch? Well the price if not a catch could be a deterrent. The Smart Cara price tag is £399 so you have to calculate what a no-odour , clean and instant processing of food waste is worth to you alongside the obvious benefits it offers the environment. One idea would be to team up with a few people in your community and share use of one.

Better still would be to persuade councils to install Smart Cara’s in their localities so that, as will re-cycling bins, we could take our food waste along and the dried manure could be given to local allotments, gardens and urban farms.

Tessa Cook and Saasha Celestial-One are co-founders of OLIO (https://olioex.com). Tessa grew up on her parents’ dairy farm in North Yorkshire and she was very conscious of how much work goes into producing food. It convinced her that food should not be wasted. The
“lightbulb” moment came when she was planning to move from Switzerland to England and realised she had quite a lot of surplus food . She couldn’t bring herself to throw it away so went around the streets looking for someone to give it to . The  idea of an app to distribute unwanted food came to her.
Her friend Saasha, daughter of American “hippie entrepreneurs” , immediately saw  it as a great idea. She had spent much childhood time with her mother on missions to rescue things others had discarded . She had wondered how to do something constructive around food.

They explain how globally over 1/3 of all the food we produce is wasted, which is worth $1 trillion; and over $100bn of this takes place in the home. OLIO addresses this problem by connecting neighbours with each other and with local shops & cafes so that surplus food can be shared, not thrown away. Users simply snap a photo of their items and add them to OLIO. Neighbours then receive customised alerts and can request anything that takes their fancy. Pick-up takes place – often the same day – at the home, an arranged store, an OLIO Drop Box, or another agreed location. Items typically found on the app include food nearing its use-by date from shops, cafes and markets; spare vegetables from the allotment; cakes from an amateur baker; or groceries from household fridges when people go away, move home or start a diet. All the food on OLIO is either available for free, or for a ‘pay as you feel’ donation to charity.

‘We piloted the app in the second half of 2015, and then made it available across the UK at the end of January 2016. Since then we’ve had over 150k users sign up and over 200k items have been shared! Demand for this surplus food is incredibly high with 40% of items being requested in less than an hour, and 80% in less than 24 hours. Our growth has been fuelled by our 10,000+ volunteers – OLIO Ambassadors we call them – who have reached out to offer to spread the word about OLIO in their local community. We’re also very excited by our “Food Waste Heroes” programme whereby we match our volunteers with a local business such as a bakery, supermarket, deli or street food market, to collect any unsold food at the end of the day (after charities have taken what they need) and re-distribute it to the local community via the OLIO app. You can watch more about our “Food Waste Heroes” programme on our website.

We also have a non-food section on the app which is used to share household items for which there is currently no real marketplace, but which a neighbour would gladly take e.g. toiletries, cosmetics, light bulbs, cleaning products, mugs etc, and non-food now represents approximately 30% of all listings.’
At its heart OLIO is all about community, and using mobile technology to reconnect neighbours with each other – over the road, round the corner – so that our most precious resources can be shared, not thrown away.

 

May 8th update

Our volunteers rock! Since OLIO’s inception, we’ve had 10,867 peoplereach out to us requesting to become volunteers + over 70,000 items of food have been shared by our volunteers alone. To showcase their impressive impact, scroll down to check our quarterly Volunteer Impact Infographic. Also, did you win our £700 competition? Find out below…

What we’re reading…

1. Why Anthony Bourdain is becoming an activist against food waste (The Hollywood Reporter)  2. Weird weather means wonky asparagus – at lower prices (The Guardian)  3. UK supermarket trials new innovative mushroom packaging to fight food waste (Food Ingredients First)

OLIO is Co-Founded by Tessa Cook and Saasha Celestial-One and backed by Accel, Quadia and Mustard Seed, and a handful of high profile angel investors.

 

The Customer Employment Partnership (http://www.cepjobs.org) was set up in 2010 to create paid employment opportunities for people who have used homelessness services and to encourage and support people with ‘lived experience’ to consider the homelessness sector as a viable career option.

It is a scheme involving a number of organisations working with homeless people including Thames Reach, Crisis, The Passage, Broadway, Centre Point, The Connection at St Martin in the Fields, Homeless Link, Providence Row Housing Association and Look Ahead and is being organised by South London YMCA. Their website has a range of available jobs.

These are generally entry-level jobs intended to give people a first step and many are support work jobs.

Breadwinners (http://www.breadwinners.org.uk) was set up to help those at the margins suffering from poverty and unemployment, find a way to work and they set up a delivery service taking artisan bread to people’s homes.. With micro-loans and training, Breadwinners buy loaves from bakeries at cost price and sell on for profit – keeping the difference to reinvest in the next day’s loaves and build their business.

The team see their initiative as  a catalyst to empower people who are unemployed to transform their circumstances by becoming their own boss. At the same time they work to  address the issues surrounding unemployment in disadvantaged communities .

The Recycling Factory explains that they (www.therecyclingfactory.com) collect and recycle over 8 million inkjet & toner cartridges each year and they take singles from individuals and hundreds from businesses.They have a  commitment to zero landfill, which ensures that products are disposed of in an ethical & environmentally friendly way.

They also donate a sum of money for each inkjet cartridge or laser print toner to a chosen charity and they are have a portfolio of UK charities for which  they have earned £3.5 million.

Most of us take for granted that we can afford a holiday or so a year and we look forward to the opportunity it gives to recharge ourselves, have an adventure, read the books we have stored up, explore new places and feel relaxed and unbothered by a world that too often seems to be on top of our heads.

Yet that is an unknown idea for many children and so CEO Justin Francis who runs Responsible Travel  has set up A Trip For a Trip, which Michael Palin is supporting. with the aim of addressing the inequalities in tourism.He explains that every time you buy a Responsible Travel holiday, if you wish, they will fund a day trip for a disadvantaged child from a developing country to visit or experience something totally new.

http://www.responsibletravel.com

 

http://www.ethicalescape.coIn their mission statement this organisation assures us that

‘our aim is to make ethical holidays as simple to organise as possible, we will provide travellers with all the information necessary to enable an easy ecotourism destination choice. we will put travellers and eco-friendly accommodation providers who share a similar ideology in touch. this website is designed to facilitate responsible ecotourism.We do not include details of any eco-friendly accommodation which fail to meet our ethical and ecotourism guidelines.’

Thinking about how we travel is part of doing good . This website gives us much to ponder about the choices we make.

Six ethical dilemmas I encountered as a traveler. What will you do?

http://www.statravel.co.uk/ethical-travel.htm  and STA are part of the Give As You Live scheme (see Easy Virtue intro)

You can read about more ways to do good here:

http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalconsumeremailnewsletter.aspx

William Macaskill has written Doing Good Better, a book that challenges us to look further at whether the things we choose as our ways of doing good, could be improved upon He is founder of the Effective Altruism Movement (http://www.effectivealtruism.com)

I quit HSBC which had been my bank for forty years when I heard about their tax misbehaviour  but looking for a bank that really does behave well in the world is very difficult. Many invest in arms and fossil fuels, I quit HSBC when its tax misbehaviour came to light. And let’s not forget that it was the big banks that caused the near-collapse of the global financial system.  Royal Bank of Scotland was ordered to pay out over  fraudulent repackaging of mortgages.

So if like me you do not want to put your money with institutions that are quite clearly harmful to the wellbeing of the world, you need to research ethical banks and decide whether the alternatives they offer appeal. A good start is to check out the Choose (http://www.choose.net/money/guide/features/how-ethical-banking.html) website where they go through questions around how ethical your bank is.

I switched to Triodos Bank earlier this year having heard good things about it, and liking the fact that they only lend to businesses and organisations that promote or provide long-term positive change. For example a current project is tackling fuel poverty for the most vulnerable. They have supported the 14 years in development  Garth Wind Limited community renewable energy company which, at the start of 2017 was about to start producing energy.

The Charity Bank (https://charitybank.org) currently holds  top spot in the Good Shopping Guide index of ethical banks and building societies.  They describe their mission simply: ‘Charity Bank was always going to be different. What drives us isn’t profits, but a shared idea about the world we want to live in. We were founded to support charities with loans that they couldn’t find elsewhere and to show people how their savings could be invested ethically and in ways that would make them happy.