A Guide to Buying Ethical Chocolates
Chocolate has always been something of a guilty pleasure but the devil has always been in the calorie count. Now however we understand the origins of our chocolate and there’s a new guilt based on the ethics behind its manufacturer and transportation. Can there be a ‘green’ way to buy chocolate? Well, fairtrade organic chocolates are your best bet (and a great gift) so here’s a quick guide on how to choose your treats.
How ‘green’ is chocolate?
For most of the world’s population chocolate can never be truly local because cacao beans can only be grown in tropical and equatorial climates. Ultimately this means that chocolate manufacture is going to involve shipping at some point and that increases carbon emissions. That’s the downside, the upside is that cacao beans, like coffee beans, are produced within infrastructures that allow fair trade bodies to oversee the agricultural process and so ensure that communities receive a fair price.
Find Sunshine and Cheap Hotels Out of Season on Holiday
Relaxing on a sun drenched beach is a top holiday pastime, but it’s often confined to the tourist heavy peak seasons. For those seeking some winter sunshine, or perhaps looking to get away from the crowds and save a bit of cash at the same time, out of season holidaying is the answer. It doesn’t have to involve travelling half way across the globe either. There’s a good variety of year-round destinations waiting to be discovered closer to home, where warm weather and some great cheap hotels can be found.
Double Glazing Cost Comparison
We’ve all heard the hullabaloo about global warming and climate change. And whether you believe it or not, the fact still remains that you can save on your utility bills and help do your bit against pollution by undertaking some simple changes in and around your home. This can include installing Double glazed windows – where two sheets of glass are separated by a thin vacuum (or gas-filled space) to reduce the amount of cool or warm air entering or leaving your house. Double glazing can mean in winter your heater is not wasting its time by warming the air only to have it escape through the glass in your windows. Or, cool air filtering into your house won’t need to be heated, thus decreasing your bills. The reverse applies in summer. The cool air is kept in, and the warm outside air is kept out. When you think about it, it makes sense. Even if you don’t care much for saving the planet, you will more than likely care for the money leaking from your pocket – and double glazing can help stem that flow.
Ethical & Recycled Silver Jewellery
As a society we are finally hearing the message about the importance of recycling. Sending waste off to landfill is no longer an acceptable practice and we are beginning to find ways of reusing perfectly good materials when the original product is no longer of any use. The same can be said for silver jewellery. The availability of recycled silver jewellery is increasing and as interest in all things recycling does too, the range of products will steadily grow.
How ethical is recycled silver jewellery?
Can recycled silver jewellery itself ever be truly ethical if we’re unsure of the original source. Well, as a metal, silver is ethical in that it is rarely thrown away because the silver industry has always recycled. Silver can be easily melted down and reused many times over and therefore it is deemed ethical by the industry because of this. The ‘ethical silver’ debate therefore moves to the process of getting the metal out of the ground in the first place.