Eco-Camping with some Green Gadgets

A great way to have a fantastic holiday, enjoy fresh air and nature, and massively reduce your travel carbon footprint is to go camping. So here are a selection of interesting and odd gadgets that will make your camping trip that little more eco-friendly!

So you're in the middle of no-where and your mobile phone runs out of juice? Maybe it's an emergency, or maybe it's not? Everyone has hit the issue of a dead battery at some inconvenient time, and that's where the Solar-Powered Mobile Phone Charger comes to the rescue! The charger has an internal battery, that when topped up via solar energy, can charge a range of devices, such as digital cameras, MP3 players and mobile phones!

If you want to escape the mobile phone, but want to keep in touch with the kids or family as they go wandering off, then this Hand-powered 2-way Radio will do the trick. A few cranks of the handle to charge it up, and then talk away! You can also listen to the AM/FM radio if you want to chill out to a little music too.

Now if you're camping, you've got to eat. If you don't want to take a load of picnicware with you on your journey, then this Bio-degradable Picnic Set can be discarded and it'll break down in a matter of weeks. No mess, no hassle and it doesn't harm the environment either!

This gadget is a real cracker. It's called the Sh*t Box. When nature calls, this collapsible cardboard-based toilet has special bags that go inside the box to allow you to discard the waste safely. You simply bury the bag and the waste, and it will biodegrade in a fairly short period of time. It saves using harmful chemicals too! Great for those music festivals I think.

So there you go, interesting and useful eco-friendly gadgets for your next camping trip!

This guest post was written by Daniel Harrison from Daily Eco Tips and EnviroGadget.com. Dan's a great fan of cool gadgets that actually benefit the planet. Dan also likes to help others to take a greener path in their life.

Eco Gadget Series (1st Issue)

These days it seems that virtually every manufacturer on the market is making a very deliberate push to fabricate environmentally-friendly products in keeping with our more acute sense of “greenness”. During the last few days a couple of products have caught my eye, here they are:

1. The Freeplay Indigo Lantern is one of those genius ideas that makes you sit back and think “I wish I had thought of that”. Building on the brand’s experience and know-how in clean energy production, Freeplay engineers have made a very dependable and modern lantern able to provide (fully charged) up to 2 ½ hours of continuous ultra bright light, and 70 hours of night-light. With a quick 60 second wind you get an hour of brilliant white light. It has no bulbs to burn out, nor disposable batteries to replace, and you can power it yourself when needed. It retails at around 20 GBP.

2. The Standby Buster. We often talk about how much power our appliances consume on stand-by and we know that there are people out there who find it hard work to turn theirs off, this gadget is for you. Standby Buster is a remote controlled electrical socket that lets you switch appliances off completely so that they use no electricity. Leaving them on standby unnecessarily uses electricity costing you money and contributing to Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions. The unit requires no installation, you plug it into an existing socket to convert it to remote control. Standby Buster is the only consumer electronics mains switch to be recommended by the Energy Saving Trust. It retails at around 10 GBP and will save you on average 40 GBP a year.