
There’s a lot of advice and tips out there now about how you can reduce your carbon footprint and your plastic consumption so we’re not going to re-invent the wheel. Here are a few of our favourites:
APPS | BOOKS | FILMS | WEBSITES
Apps
Giki
Download the Giki app to get informed and know the impact of your UK supermarket products for a healthy, sustainable lifestyle. And find products that are healthier and more ethical too. We also check for chemicals of concern, high animal welfare, additives and healthiness too.
Too Good to Go
Join millions of food waste warriors by downloading the world’s number 1 app for fighting food waste. You can buy quality local food for as little as £2 – great food that would otherwise have gone to waste. A third of all food produced is wasted. It’s not just the food itself that goes to waste, it’s all the resources that went into making it, from water to land and labour. When wasted, food is responsible for 8% of the global greenhouse gas emissions.
OLIO
Become a zero food waste business with OLIO. If you’re a bakery, coffee shop, deli, supermarket, canteen, hotel, school, farm, any other food business or someone working with food, such as a food photographer, OLIO can provide Food Waste Heroes to pick up and redistribute your surplus food.
Oroeco
This app helps you cut back your carbon footprint, by tracking everything from driving to shopping and home energy efficiency to encouraging little changes. There’s plenty of climate change prevention projects to get involved in, too.
PaperKarma
PaperKarma is a mobile app that automatically unsubscribes you from junk mail and unwanted catalogues. Go postal on direct mailings and marketing distribution lists. Catalogues choice is yours: simply snap a photo to take control of your mailbox.
Refill
Find hundreds of thousands of Refill Stations across the UK to refill your water bottle for free. Save money, stay hydrated and prevent plastic pollution.
Good Fish Guide
Use the Good Fish Guide to find out which fish are the most sustainable (Green rated), and which are the least sustainable (Red rated). Make the right choice and reduce your impact – every purchase matters! Find out more about Marine Conservation Society’s seafood work, including how they develop seafood ratings, plus sustainable seafood recipes and more.
Freegle
Give and get stuff for free in your local community. Don’t just recycle – reuse, freecycle and freegle!
Forest
Forest is an app helping you put down your phone and focus on what’s more important in your life. Whenever you want to focus on your work, plant a tree. In the next 30 mins, it will grow when you are working.
Books
How to Save the World for Free
Are you worried about the effects of climate change on our environment? Want to help but don’t know where to start? Natalie Fee’s new handbook to green living will help you to make small lifestyle changes which will make a big difference to our planet.
No. More. Plastic.
With a foreword by Chris Packham this book written by Martin Dorey, the founder of #2MinuteBeachClean, helps you to make a difference through small actions.
No One is Too Small to Make a Difference
In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day. Her actions ended up sparking a global movement for action against the climate crisis, inspiring millions of pupils to go on strike for our planet, forcing governments to listen, and earning her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.
This book brings you Greta in her own words, for the first time. Collecting her speeches that have made history across Europe, from the UN to mass street protests.
Finn the Fortunate Tiger Shark and His Fantastic Friends
The children’s book by Georgina Stevens helps them to learn how to protect our oceans with Finn the Tiger Shark.
Plastic Game Changer
Our beautiful oceans are filling with plastic. Devastating marine wildlife and disrupting fragile ecosystems; it is also threatening to be a future human health disaster. We must act now to limit the damage. But how do we wean ourselves off this material that has infiltrated every corner of our lives? Plastic Game Changer, by Amanda Keetley is an inspirational, practical guide for professionals who want to do something meaningful to tackle the plastic pandemic. The 5Ps framework will empower you to transform plastic usage in your organisation.
Films & Documentaries
Plastic China
Banned in China, this documentary tells the story of a family that scrapes by working to sort plastic waste.
A Plastic Whale
Focusing on a dead whale whose stomach was full of plastic bags and packaging, this Sky documentary looks for possible environmental solutions and forms part of its supprt for its Ocean Rescue campaign.
A Plastic Ocean
Craig Leeson investigates the environmental impacts of ocean plastic waste.
Plastic Paradise: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Angela Sun’s journey of discovery to one of the most remote places on Earth, Midway Atoll, to uncover the truth behind the mystery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Terrifying stuff.
Wasteland
This documentary shows the transformative power of art and the beauty of the human spirit. Artist Vik takes the viewer from the world’s largest landfill site outside Rio to international art stardom. He collaborates with the pickers who live and work in the rubbish.
How to Change the World
This chronicles the adventures of an eclectic group of young pioneers who set out to stop Richard Nixon’s nuclear bomb tests in Alaska, and end up creating the worldwide green movement with the birth of Greenpeace.
Stacey Dooley Investigates Fashion’s Dirty Little Secret
The Strictly 2018 winner investigates the shocking environmental impact caused by our insatiable appetite for cheap clothing.
War on Plastic
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Anita Rani explore the plastic pollution problem and what can be done to try and solve it. They challenge big businesses to do more to reduce the plastic in their products, questioning the government about what they are doing to address recycling and plastic production. Plus an entire street in Bristol tries to significantly reduce the amount of single-use plastic in their homes, over the course of four months, to discover how easy, or difficult, it is to make these kind of changes.
Seven Worlds, One Planet
Millions of years ago incredible forces ripped apart the Earth’s crust creating seven extraordinary continents. One Planet: Seven Worlds, presented by Sir David Attenborough, will reveal how each distinct continent has shaped the unique animal life found there. The series will celebrate the diversity of life on each of these continents, but also the many challenges faced by animals in a modern world dominated by humanity.By telling unknown, unseen and unexpected wildlife stories, we will uncover the fundamental truth about what makes each one of our seven worlds unique.
Websites
Positive News
Positive News is the magazine for good journalism about the good things that are happening. When much of the media is full of doom and gloom, instead Positive News is the first media organisation in the world that is dedicated to quality, independent reporting about what’s going right.
Pebble Magazine
Whether it’s sustainable design, ethical fashion, slow food or eco-travel, pebble is about how we want to live, the world we want in the future, our dreams and desires. #pebblesmakeripples
Less Plastic
Less Plastic is a non-profit organisation tackling ocean plastic with campaigns & strategies that inspire individuals & businesses to reduce plastic waste.