Fight Climate Change

Plasticine TV and movie legends Wallace and Gromit are taking on energy saving in a bid to encourage us all to be more energy efficient. In a new TV advert for nPower viewers will see Wallace having a shower when the boiler breaks down. Gromit fails to fix the boiler, Wallace is left naked and who are you going to call? Well they turn to npower’s ‘Home Team Bob’!

The advert will debut on the small screen on 28th March just before Earth Hour 2009. For a few minutes you’re going to just have to forget that Wallace and Gromit are clever inventors, that they’ve been to the moon, created Technotrousers, bungeed around doing window cleaning, fought a Were Rabbit and have also been master bakers! We think fixing a boiler should be well within their capabilities!

Of course anything that encourages consumers to be more energy efficient has to be a bonus, although most may well think having cheaper bills and price cuts should be higher priority for the energy companies! The good news is that prices are starting to come down. nPower recently announced a reduction in their costs following similar steps by other suppliers including British Gas and Scottish Power.

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The greenest movie premiere ever took place in London’s Leicester Square last night (15th March) in the form of new climate change movie The Age of Stupid. It stars Oscar nominated Pete Postlethwaite “as a man living alone in the devasted world of 2055, looking back at archive footage from 2007 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?”. Postlethwaite, a keen green campaigner, told Something for the Weekend that the carbon emissions for the premiere were just 1% of a typical movie launch!

The premiere took place in a solar-powered cinema tent and was also broadcast via satellite link to become the most watched movie premiere ever! Visitors were specifically asked not to fly in for the event and celebrities arrived, not in the traditional limo, but by bike or solar powered cars. The movie, which cost just £450,000 to make, hopes to emulate the success of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth in getting the climate change message over to a sceptical public, who seem inclined to ignore climate issues.

However, rather than using science, Age of Stupid uses real examples of climate change that are occurring right now. By driving home the fact that climate change is happening right now and show it’s impact at different places around the globe it’s hoped people who see the film will start to try and make a difference.

The Age of Stupidis in cinemas across the UK from March 20th!

If your council is anything like ours in Swansea you’ve probably got bins, bags and boxes for all kinds of recycling waste. Keeping them organised can be a pain and let’s face it recycling bins aren’t exactly the prettiest of things to have in the home. So how about having a designer recycling bin? For an incredible RRP of £135 you could have a designer bin that will get your guests talking… maybe!

The Ovetto Recycled Recycling Bin is designed by Italian architect, Gianluca Soldi. It’s a funky design, like a kind of egg on a plinth, that wouldn’t look too far out of place on Mork and Mindy. It’s made with recycled materials and is finished off in a range of stylish colours. It even features a cool bottle crusher mechanism on the top of the bin, as well as three sections to post the relevant recycling waste.

If you’re not so keen on the brightly coloured bin then there are versions in white and black – it’s only £5 cheaper though at RRP £130. We think the black one looks the most practical, whilst the coloured one is the most stylish.

However, whilst these are pretty cool looking bins, like cheaper counterparts they still suffer from the same problem. Households are being asked to recycle cardboard, tins, bottles, plastics, food wastes, and paper… but how many segments does the bin have? And if you have a couple of pets and kids then the bins get fill far too quickly with just a few items.

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Justin Rowlatt is The BBC’s Ethical Man. He and his family featured in a documentary showing how they tried to cut their carbon emissions over a 12 month period. Well, now he’s back and has a bigger eco challenge to face – America. In the new challenge, Ethical Man: Reborn in The USA, Justin will be travelling across the country to see how global warming can be tackled or indeed if it should be tackled.

The idea is simple, as according to Justin, “If we can solve global warming here, we can solve it anywhere”.

As part of the challenge Justin also has to keep his own environmental impact down. That means that apart from the flight from The UK to America his travels will need to be the most low carbon way possible. The idea for the programme has already sparked debate on Ethical Man’s blog. Some people are questioning the relevancy of the documentary whilst others are making useful trip suggestions to Justin.

You can follow Justin on his travels via his blog, Twitter and Facebook.

Earth Hour 2009 promises to be the more spectacular, and potentially more newsworthy, than it’s predecessors as lights go off on National landmarks and monuments around the world. Earth Hour, a global event organised by The WWF to highlight a united front on the need for climate change, takes place on 28th March 2009. Over 370 cities in 74 countries are expected to take part in the event.

Lights will go off at many iconic locations including “Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Table Mountain in Cape Town, Merlion in Singapore, Sydney Opera House, CN Tower in Toronto and Millennium Stadium in Cardiff” (Panda).

Visit the official website to find out more about Earth Hour and how you can take part. The website is a little bit disjointed – for example it’s almost impossible to work out which cities are involved in the event. However it’s worth a look and you can register your support, find out what others are doing and download a guide to running your own event. Earth Hour images and pictures can be downloaded from Flickr. This year you can follow the build up to Earth Hour on Twitter too.

At 8.30pm on 28th March why not switch off your lights for just one hour and take part in this global event?