Why do I care? Or do I?

I was an eco-cynic, but after reading and watching all the information about the possibility of us ruining our planet (or not) from all sides of the argument I decided it was time to haul out a take on Pascal’s (French C17^th philosopher) Gambit (huh?) who basically said that live like God exists so if he does you’re quids in and if he doesn’t you lived a good life and everyone benefits. So recycle, save energy, water, do what you can to minimise the production of new stuff and no matter whether the World is in big trouble or not you can help.

Some figures to visualise the extent of how you can help:

• If you buy a newspaper everyday, on average you will buy 142kgs of newsprint every year, it takes 25 trees to produce a tonne of paper, so you use 1 tonne every 7 years or 3.5 trees a year to read your news. I mainly use google.com/ig, a way of creating your own daily newspaper with news feeds that you choose to read and are interested in.
  

• The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle can run a 100-watt light bulb for four hours. It also causes 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution than when a new bottle is made from raw materials.

• About 15% of the purchase price of anything is packaging, packaging accounts for up to 65% of household waste if you don’t recycle. If your household spends 500€ per week that’s 75€ per week or 3900€ per year on packaging.

• Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it.

• Plastic takes over 500 years to decompose. Used engine oil never does.

• A recycled tin can would save enough energy to power a television for 3 hours.

• If we recycled all the aluminium cans we would need 14 million less bins (UK figure).

I could spend the next 10 pages listing all the facts and figures, but I’m sure you see the point by now.

A Danish financier, who has obviously got too much time on his hands, too much money, and an over-active imagination, has backed a product which I’m sure we’d all have second thoughts about using, degradable plates and cutlery made in part from pig’s urine! Peter Tøttrup said "There are 20 million pigs in Denmark, and what they do environmentally is a problem," - no shit Sherlock.

But lastly my favourite green gadget (and I suspect most men’s as well). Writer Adrienne So in San Francisco has proposed a charger for iPods or mobile phones utilising the natural movement of a woman’s breasts (could work for the larger men out there as well). Apparently the bigger the breast the more potential energy the device could produce.