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.

Less Taxes More Eco

I wonder whether adding compulsory eco taxes to our shop and hotel bills in holiday hotspots is really the answer. Lately I have had this experience in a number of shops in mainland Europe where the price on the label is “touched-up” at the till to include an eco incentive.

Obviously, I have no particular objection to the gathering of funds for green projects; I just think that overall this could be done in a more sensible and less forceful way. It is true that in holiday destinations where there is an obvious duty to protect the environment, this money is needed, but it is also true that very seldom we get told where the money is going. How much of it will benefit the environment? How much of it will go to local projects? It does make you wonder how the whole process can be rendered more transparent and certainly less pushy. When the eco-tax made its way to the Balearic Islands for instance, and money started to pour in, there wasn’t even an obligation to talk about where it would eventually go; in some cases it hadn’t even been decided.

I think that sometimes people do make the right decisions and genuinely want to help green projects, but local governments should really try and think of more creative ways of doing this other than just slapping miscellaneous charges onto our bills. The truth is that this type of activity actually does not benefit the green movement in the long run as people paying these extras begin to associate the word ECO with the word TAX!

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.

Saving Whales is Possible!

A conservation success on a literally “massive scale” has been highlighted today by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). It seems that in the 40th year of the international hunting ban, the humpback whale is making a comeback.
Marine biologists estimate that the number of humpbacks worldwide may have grown to more than 40,000 adults and about 15,000 juveniles, prompting the revision of their classification from "vulnerable" to "of least concern" on the latest annual list of endangered animals.
This is a great conservation story and it serves to highlight the fact that we can do something about these problems. If we extend the same attention to other cetaceans (of which 10% are classified as endangered or critically endangered) then we can break the trend and bring some of these species back from the brink of extinction.
Smaller coastal and fresh water species, including the vaquita porpoise, finless porpoise, South American river dolphin and Irrawaddy dolphin, are increasingly at risk of disappearing and it is really up to us to ensure our oceans remain filled with these unique and important species.

Are the Beijing Olympics Green?

It should come as no surprise that the effort to safeguard our environment has made it to the Olympics too! Here, the Organizational Committee, aided by various international associations and green project specialists, has been able to stage what they call “Zero Net Emissions Games” also dubbed the “Green Olympics”.

The emphasis has gone into reducing emissions and including all sorts of neat features like community sustainability planning and green buildings. In a city plagued by terrible pollution this is an important step towards a healthier environment.

One of the key features of this whole project has been the efficient transport “design”, for instance, care has been taken in planning journeys to and from the events and with the use of some very modern telecommunication systems the number of journalists on site has been greatly reduced. Even the commentaries can be done remotely from anywhere in the world. This project is something of a first and we hope that from now on it will be an important part of all future Olympic events.

Is Eco-Chic the Future?

For once the general consumer trend seems to be encouraging. Although the economy is going through a rough patch, the buying of all things “green” has not stopped and the general consensus seems to be that people want to do the right thing.

Of course a great number of production houses, designers and fashion businesses have jumped onto the bandwagon and are offering their very own take on environmentally sound products. Interestingly, the fashion industry seems to be at the forefront of new eco-styles with the help of some heavy-duty names: from architect Zaha Hadid to actresses such as Angelina Jolie, who has been buying eco-chic babywear for her new twins.

I suspect that as time passes we will all be influenced more and more by the importance of eco products and there may indeed be a time when there is no such thing as a non-eco product! In the meantime there are great things to be found out there and as the new catwalk inspired fashion products make it into our shops we will surely be on the cusp of a fashion revolution.

The Site of World War Three

Ok, so the title might be a little dramatic but what’s happening a few miles North of our shores is so ridiculous that it might just end up spelling the biggest socio-political disaster of our time. For those that are unaware, the Arctic has recently been the site of some pretty serious border disputes involving major fuel-hungry countries.

Following a massive international failure to secure the same kind of protection that Antartica has enjoyed, we now play witness to the steady march of the oil machine. Russia, Canada, the United States and Denmark (controlling Greenland) are all reviewing their position and exploring their options. In the meantime controversy has already hit the headlines when a Russian submarine planted a flag on the Arctic seabed as an act of provocation designed to show they mean business. What they have really shown is that they are impotently greedy and incapable of seeing the bigger picture.

By drilling in this incredibly delicate and already environmentally trampled environment we are doing nothing but selling ourselves out for a quick profit. The natural repercussions are massive and the only benefit is to boost the economy (for a short while) of countries that thus far, rather like drug addicts, seem to look for more places to score their filth rather than work on kicking the habit. One day there won’t be anywhere left to dig and we will probably regret wasting all this valuable research time and money in silly disputes and flag planting exercises.