Green is for relaxation and beauty

Reef One aquariums, 2,000-7,000 yuan/Photos provided by Lu Mingzhe

By Annie Wei

BP’ shop cannot compete with the Liangma and the Laitai flower markets in product quantity, but it makes up for that with creative presentation and after-sales service. 

The plant and flower boutique at Park Life was established by three young men in advertising and design who say plants can help stressed-out urbanites to relax. They sell flower bouquets (99 yuan) arranged by their Japanese flower designer and interesting plants in stylish pots, which create a soothing atmosphere.

Cycling while pregnant keeps you fit and prepares your body for the uphill struggle of childbirth

When I first emailed colleagues to let them know I was pregnant among the congratulations and “That’ll cause a dip in the Smirnoff share price”-type chortle came this unexpected note from our receptionist, “You’re not still cycling to work are you? Is that safe?”

The truth was I didn’t know. As an avid cyclist, with a firm belief that riding to and from work makes living in London not just bearable but actually quite pleasurable, it was one of the first things I’d Googled after the test shone positive. Yet the advice was conflicting. Everyone agreed on the physical and psychological benefits of moderate, low-impact exercise during a low-risk pregnancy, and the NHS advises women to “keep up your normal daily physical activity or exercise for as long as you feel comfortable”. But it also warns against cycling “because there’s a risk of falling”. A sentiment echoed by parenting sites, such as the NCT and BabyCentre, the latter warning against all but riding an exercise bike as “even if you’re an experienced cyclist, there’s a danger you’ll fall or be knocked off your bike.”

Really? Granted some accidents will be tragically unavoidable, but isn’t that the case when you cross a road or get into your car?

Thankfully the CTC – the national cyclists’ organisation – was on hand with positive advice and useful tips from raising your handlebars and fitting lower gears to the more spirited “cut down on those off-road descents and don’t race-train in a pack”. They also tell you to consult your doctor first, which I did. She saw no reason why I shouldn’t cycle as long as I took it easy and listened to my body. At three months in, my body was feeling good, with the only sniff of morning sickness coming on the rare mornings when I took the train and bus to work, which also doubled my journey time.

Read more

It’s easy being green

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6726845.ece
Home’s new eco-expert and ex-director of Friends of the Earth says you don’t have to go to extremes for a sustainable life
Tony Juniper
I have spent the past 25 years working for a more sustainable world. I have campaigned to save endangered species and to protect the rainforest; for stronger pollution controls, standards for greener products and laws to cut emissions of climate-changing gases.

For 18 of those years I worked for Friends of the Earth, including six as its UK director. I took companies and government departments to court, protested at international summits, organised campaigns to challenge companies who were abusing the environment. I mobilised local groups to urge prime ministers to act and was more than once detained by police forces around the world.

Looking back, it was all worth it. This past quarter of a century has seen some amazing progress. My work used to feel decidedly fringe, but now it is firmly in the mainstream. The momentum for greener living now seems unstoppable. Only last week, ministers set out an ambitious programme to slash CO2 emissions by 34% by 2020. A big part of the delivery of this first round of cuts — we need to reduce emissions by 80% by 2050 — will fall on householders. It seems our country’s 26m or so homes will be at the front line of green action, and there will be new inducements to encourage us all to do our bit.

These days, I work as a special adviser for the Prince’s Rainforests Project, and am employed on a consultancy basis by the University of Cambridge and international companies on how to be more sustainable. This week, I will start writing the Greenhouse Effects column here in the Sunday Times Home section. I will try to make sense of some of the choices available for greener living and offer practical advice on how to make a difference — and, where possible, save money.

Over the years, my wife, Sue, and I have tried to live a greener life. We are a family of five living in an Edwardian semi in Cambridge. We moved to our present house six years ago as the children got too big for our charming (but too small) Victorian terrace on the other side of town. We have a springer spaniel, a black-and-white cat and a bunch of rare-breed chickens. With two teenagers and a 12-year-old, and both of us working, life is far from straightforward. In common with most families, our green challenges are in energy use, the products we buy, how we travel, waste generation, water consumption, food and chemicals.

Our house was built in about 1905, when, it is fair to say, green issues were not high on the agenda. While a lot of attention these days is focused on the building of new green houses, we forget that in 2050, about 80% of the properties in existence now will probably still be in use. In other words, the Elizabethan, Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian, prewar, interwar and post-war buildings that we already have will be the biggest bit of our domestic green challenge for a long time to come. If we are to become more sustainable, it is at home that we need to get cracking.

A lot of people expect our house to be covered in solar panels and to sport a wind turbine. It’s not. Our approach at home is based on common sense, simple mathematics and where we can make a difference. If official incentives become clearer — for example, a feed-in tariff to reward homeowners who have small-scale renewable power systems, which would transform the economics of such technologies — then the Juniper family, along with everyone else, will be more likely to sign up. We might do it anyway though.

Until then, each time we replace something that uses energy, we try to buy products that use less than the one that is going. We also choose products that look as if they might last — from toasters to fridges and from radios to cars (a Skoda Octavia estate). There is a choice in terms of how much energy products will use and in how quickly they will embark on their final journey to the dump. Sometimes there is a cost premium, but not always.

We’ve started to change our light bulbs from the energy-efficient compact fluorescent type to the even more efficient LED (light-emitting diode) kind. The spotlights in our kitchen ceiling were originally of the halogen type — 50W apiece. With 10 of them, each time we switched on the kitchen lights, we were piling half a kilowatt of power into them. We have now cut that energy demand by about 90%. The LEDs are more expensive to buy, but they use less power and will last far longer, so they will save money. We buy our electricity from Good Energy (goodenergy.co.uk), a company that gets all its power from renewable sources. This costs more than that from polluting coal and gas, but because we use less of it, our bills remain remarkably low.

Even though our power is greener and its use is becoming more efficient, we still struggle to get the children to turn off lights or take their computers and electronic devices off standby. They are good recyclers, though.

We’ve insulated the loft spaces and put in some draughtproofing, but with solid walls we can’t do cavity-wall insulation. We are looking at ways to save heat by lining some external walls. We have open fireplaces, but these are inefficient, so we might install a wood-burning stove. We have considered replacing some of the original wooden sash windows with double-glazed replacements, but haven’t done so yet.

Our 88ft-long garden produces a bit of food. Our chickens, fed in part on kitchen scraps, keep us in eggs. There is a greenhouse that in summer produces tomatoes, salad leaves, peppers, courgettes and a few strawberries. We also have a couple of ancient apple trees that produce late fruit. We grow some raspberries and rhubarb, and have started to put in raised beds for growing other vegetables. We compost organic waste and use that as a soil conditioner.

We don’t use any chemicals in the garden. There is a pond full of frogs and we have several species of birds that regularly nest. A resident song thrush helps to deal with the snails. When we had a loft conversion, we asked our builders to make some cavities for birds to nest in. We wanted swifts, but are pleased nonetheless to have finished up with sparrows and starlings.

We live in a city-centre location where car use is not necessary for most day-to-day purposes. We have cut car use even more by using bicycles. I have a folding bike to take on the train to London for my frequent commutes to the capital. With a Dutch cargo bike, we can short-cut the traffic jams when doing our weekly food shop. Both provide welcome exercise, and it’s amazing how little we get rained on. We have good doorstep recycling facilities and our black bin (the one that goes to landfill) has progressively less in it.

Greener living is sometimes portrayed as being about sacrifice. I aim to offer ideas that show this to be mistaken. If we do it right, going greener can lead to longer, healthier lives, lower bills and nicer places to live. We can — and need to — play our part.

As we go along, it would be great to hear what you are all doing. So drop us a line, letting us know what you are trying, what works and what doesn’t. Everyone starts from a different place, everyone has a different way to go — and everyone can go further.