Welcome back to the Planet Forward blog. Don’t forget with Valentine’s Day coming up soon you can say I love you to your partner and the planet by purchasing him or her a stainless steel water bottle or thermal. I’ve found some interesting environmental news items since my last post so if you can stay a while please read on.

Teletubby house?

So what do the worlds most valuable sports franchise, teletubbies and eco-friendly home construction have in common? Until today I’d have been unable to answer that question partly because I have no great love for the first two things on that list (especially Manchester United) but now there is a connection. It seems that the Man Utd defender thug Gary Neville is seeking planning permission for a eclectic looking hilltop  home that is extremely eco-friendly. The design laid out is very unique in that it is primarily underground but the images are somehow familiar – yes that’s right it looks like the dwelling of the teletubbies. Please have a look at the images in the UK Newspaper the Daily Mail to see if you agree.  Once you get past the funny part of the design, to be fair it is a very green construction with a wind turbine and solar power making the property carbon neutral.

Continuing the sporting theme let us now head over to golf and a company just a few miles from me who are marketing what they are calling the world’s premier eco-friendly golf ball. Dixon Golf have created the first high-performance eco-friendly golf balls. Other golf ball brands that use harsh heavy-metal pollutants like tungsten, cobalt, lead or contain non-renewable synthetic materials and compounds;  Dixon’s are rather different. They are 100% recyclable and made from renewable materials. Even the packaging is made from 100% recycled material. Sounds like a good strategy to me…now if only I played golf. Check out the video below:

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This is an interesting read with a happy ending. It seems that Cypress Gardens, Florida’s huge botanical gardens that became a strange hybrid of an amusement park/nature has been shut down and is going to be transformed into the world’s largest Legoland. The famed gardens were world famous and would have celebrated their 75th anniversary next year, instead Florida is adding another large amusement park to the already intense tourist market that fuels the state’s economy. Naturally enough some are concerns that the eco-impact of converting the gardens to a plastic paradise will have negative consequences on the beautiful flora of the park. This article raises many of those concerns and has found a reasonably optimistic reply from the Merlin Entertainments CEO (the owners of Legoland)

“…their botanical gardens are safe with us.” The company plans on keeping and reopening the beloved botanical gardens”

That’s a story worth keeping an eye on. It would be nice if the giant theme parks made a concession to a remote parking area and green transport to the park itself…..oh for Disney’s monorail to have become the future like we were promised all those years ago!