zero waste

#EthicalHour Roundup – Packaged Free Planet

Kate Stuart is an artist, craftswoman and writer based in the North East of England. Owner of The Phoenix Green Store, she is currently in the process of transforming it into Newcastle Upon Tyne’s first zero waste shop. She handles the magazine’s Twitter account every Monday evening from 8pm GMT for #EthicalHour. Packaging is a big deal. As the world wakes up to the idea of zero waste, plastic free living and the 7 R’s of sustainability*, it’s becoming an [...]

Quitting Plastic Isn’t Hard, It’s Almost Impossible!

By Holly by Heart I started this year thinking I’d make a few swaps in my usual food shop and I’d be able to cut out a large chunk of the plastic in my bin. I was wrong. It’s hard. Really hard. As in almost impossible! I’ve seen the zero waste tribe in articles. They seem like lovely people but unfortunately they seem unrelatable. They have to eat Weetabix for breakfast (the only cereal wrapped in paper), they buy grains in [...]

Living Ink: Biomaterials Company

Living Ink is a biomaterials company transforming algae into eco-friendly ink. Every year more than 4 billion kg of ink is produced around the world. Most of this ink is made using petroleum products that are toxic. Living Ink uses algae as an alternative to make ink that is renewable, biodegradable and non-toxic. The company has commercial ink formulations for printing on cardboard and paper packaging. Our interview with Living Ink is featured in the Winter Issue 2017, The Yarn [...]

‘Tis the Season to be Jolly Without Creating Waste

As the time of the year where it is most difficult keep our waste to a minimum approaches, Sharron from Losana B wants us to reflect about a seemingly small problem: sweet wrappers. We have a lot of these individually wrapped chocolates and sweets over the holidays even though the wrappers’ destiny is the general waste bin. If we don’t want to go without, can we reuse them in creative ways? Everybody loves the sweets, chocolates and other treats that [...]

The Simply Co.: Finally, an eco-friendly laundry powder

No SLS. No dyes. No 1-4 dioxane. No EDTA. No petrochemicals. No Chlorine. No Phosphates. No DEA. No formaldehyde. No optical brighteners. No synthetic preservatives. No animal testing. – EVER! Lauren Singer lives a Zero Waste lifestyle, and since many readers of her amazing blog were writing to her saying that they loved the idea of her toxic free and sustainable cleaning products, but they didn’t have the time to make them themselves, she decided to start her own [...]

Runner Handmade: Start your “plastic free” challenge

About one year ago, Meghan and her boyfriend decided to try going “plastic free” for one month. As she says in her blog, “The challenge was eye-opening”. She couldn’t find great options for going plastic free, so she started sewing more, knitting more and gardening more… and that’s how the idea of Runner Handmade came up. Meghan started by creating her own line of bulk bags. These have been tried and tested by her personally, but this is just the [...]

Remarkably Reusable: easy, convenient, and fun ways to cut plastic use

Remarkably Reusable is the eco-friendly business created by Madisyn Stopani in North Carolina, United States, aiming at the reduction of plastic use. Once Madisyn realised what a problem plastic is fur our environment, she decided to start creating reusable mesh produce bags that would allow people to cut plastic use in easy, convenient and even fun ways. After she found out that most tea bags contain plastic, Madisyn, as an avid tea drinker, initiated her production of tea bags. [...]

Silkworm Yarn Shop: a small sewing shop, with a bit of everything

As a hyperactive child, what is now known as ADHD, Roxana Milby drove her mother nuts. After a while, her mom found out that crafts helped her focus – even if she had 3 projects going at once! Her mom signed Roxana up for classes in crafts she didn’t know and taught her what she could. That is how in the 1980’s, Roxana began helping her mother to teach her classes. While her mom hated to teach, she loved [...]

Adriana Santanocito: Research, Fashion and Passion for Sicily

“Behind every innovative product that wants to go to market, there needs to be an awareness of how industrial logic and economics work.” An enthusiast for fashion, an entrepreneur, a creator, a forward-thinker. This is how Adriana Santanocito, founder of Orange Fiber, could be described. Orange Fiber is one of those amazing startups that makes you believe in the power of creative thinking. The company aims to use the byproducts from the citrus juice industry – currently valuing 700.000 tonnes just [...]

Discover the ‘Unpaper Towels’

Our ‘Unpaper towels’ came about because we were always using paper towels to clean up everything. Spills on the counter and floor, food on faces, wetting and dusting book shelves etc. and we started really noticing how much waste we were going through when we would empty our recycling and garbage and it was full of them. My husband suggested I start sewing reusable cloths, which we would keep stacked on our knife block to use for such spills. [...]

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