It’s March! How did that happen - I’m sure I was just adjusting to it being a new decade just a few weeks ago and suddenly January and February have both come and gone. Nevertheless I’ll move forward with the latest installment of the Green Gazette where we share with you all the green news and ideas that are fit to print (in an online sense).

This is giant retail news from the UK - I can’t think of a good equivalent in North America (perhaps Target?) but the British retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S) has announced a green commitment that is beyond compare. You can read all about it via this link from the Environmental Leader but I’ll be happy to share the abbreviated version with you. M&S have made a statement that by 2020 every product that they sell must be able to boast of ‘at least one eco or ethical attribute’. Phase one is that 50% of suppliers have reached the threshold by 2015 and 100% by the end of the decade. It’s a fantastic step and part of the retailers huge ‘Plan A’ which calls for the company, by 2012, to become carbon neutral, send no waste to landfills and extend sustainable sourcing. The actual scope of the project is as ambitious as it is impacting, as the retailer currently carries some 36,000 product lines. Very exciting!

Do you remember Kon-Tiki, the (eco) boat/raft constructed by Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl from limited parts to demonstrate his theory that the native people of South America had constructed a craft to traverse the South Pacific many hundreds of years prior to the European golden age of explorers? No?  I had to read the book in school and while many of the details escape me all these years later the name of the boat certainly remains. Thus I found it novel that banking heir turned environmentalist David de Rothschild has named his vessel ‘Plas-tiki’ as a modern day homage to the sailing Dane. Plas-tiki is a remarkable boat also, made up of some 12,000 recycled 2 litre plastic bottles. His mission is of similar stature and involves sailing from California to the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The giant garbage patch is a huge soup of plastic waste and other man made sludge that circles in on itself in the middle of our largest ocean. Estimates on size range from 700,000 square kilometres (270,000 sq mi) to more than 15,000,000 square kilometres (5,800,000 sq mi) (0.41% to 8.1% of the size of the Pacific Ocean), or up to “twice the size of the continental United States” The area may contain over 100 million tons of debris. His trip is aimed to bring attention to the growing area of the ocean that is essentially dying due to the poor water quality. If he sticks to his plans he’ll not be stuck in the patch and will continue onward to Australia. You can follow his eco-adventure via his blog. Incidentally Kon-Tiki was almost a success, read the book!

Finally a story of good luck and what a lucky couple then did with it. Winning a lottery of over £56 million in the UK (over $82 million) an

English couple did what many winners would do and moved into a new home. After giving  their old home to their cleaner (they had a cleaner) Nigel Page and Justine Laycock purchased a 400-year-old dairy farm. Where’s the green in that you might wonder? The farm was restored by developer Paul Lavelle, who spent £2 million transforming it into an eco-friendly home. It features a ’solar park’ where 20 panels captured the (occasional) heat of the sun and store it in rocks in the ground and later distributed to the home. The house uses just 10% of the energy required to run a normal household. The farm is almost 100 per cent carbon neutral, you can read more about it in the Daily Mail.

That’s all for now!

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Tags: carbon footprint, Climate Change, Eco Friendly, eco-friendly lifestyle, energy conservation, Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Green Living, greener lifestyle, kontiki, lottery winners eco house, M & S, Marks and Spencer, pacific garbage, planet forward, Plastiki, Sustainable Practice, sustainable sourcing, Target, thor heyerdahl

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