Joining a ‘veg box’ scheme has been on my list of green things I really ought to do for a couple of years but when I checked it out it seemed extremely restrictive – having to commit to the same thing every week, prohibitively expensive, or limited in what they offer.

But at the Camden Green Fair a few weeks back I visited the Farm Direct stall and their set-up is completely different.

You don’t have to order the same thing each time, and you don’t even have to place an order each week – perfect for me as I’m away such a lot. Also, they sell so much more than fruit and veg – they have meat, fish, cheese, fruit juice, bread, flowers, jams and more, with different options each week depending what they’ve sourced.

The depot is close to me in Holloway so I can go and pick it up if I can’t be in for delivery on a Saturday or Sunday. And though delivery normally costs £3.95, you get it free on your first order, and if you have a neighbour who’s also interested, they’ll deliver to you both for free. Apparently there’s someone else in my block of flats who’s already using the service so Farm Direct’s going to put me in touch with them.

Farm Direct is also much clearer on exactly where all of their produce has been sourced from, right down to the name of the farmer, unlike veg box pioneers Able & Cole who aren’t able to give you specifics. I loved reading that my minced lamb came from Nicola Bulgin’s Beatbush Organic Farm in Methwold, Norfolk; my chicken from Gill Wing’s Organic Farm in Sussex; my natural yoghurt from Chris Timotheou’s Dairy in Chalfont St Peter; my splendid rye loaf made by Matt Jones’ Flour Power City Bakery in Surrey Quays, London; spinach from Martin Mackey Ripple Farm Organics in Canterbury, and so on.

I’ve already had one salad using my rocket, cucumber and carrots and it was deeee-licious. They even threw in a bunch of dahlias for free as I had a promo code from the Fair!

But however much I’ve been impressed by the service and the quality of the produce they offered, I simply couldn’t justify it if it costs a lot more than I budget for. But I’ve just priced up what I’d normally have spent at Sainsbury’s and it’s barely any different.

In fact, the lamb, chicken and rocket came in cheaper. The total cost for the basket at Sainsbury’s would have been £17.39 (see pricing to the right).

For infinitely better quality produce, all locally-sourced, I paid just £18.36 with Farm Direct (see pricing below). And I didn’t have to struggle home on the bus with all my shopping bags!

There are still a few staples which I’ll have to go to the supermarket for – Ryvita, Actimel, tinned stuff and so on. But I’m hoping I might be able to stock up on these once a month since they aren’t perishable. Farm Direct also seems very open to new suggestions so I might put in a request for cottage cheese in case that’s something they can work on…

I was a guest of the Malaysia Tourist Board, which won Gold for its rainforest-inspired garden, designed by James Wong (off the Grow Your Own Drugs programme on TV).

The garden was really beautiful, with square stone slabs like stepping-stones on a shallow lake, and shiny foliage of different greens, shapes and textures.

I heard a few visitors grumble that there weren’t actually any flowers, but I loved it – much more to my taste than rows of rhodedendrons or pots of pansies.

A soundtrack of bird and animal noises played softly in the background and it was so relaxing I almost fell asleep on the Minister of
Tourism.

Dato Sri Dr Ng Yen Yen, the minister, told me all about the flowers in her own garden, and about the government’s plan to create a Malaysian version of the Royal Horticultural Society, to get more Malaysians involved in and excited by gardening.

I also had an interesting chat with James himself, about how gardeners often tend to want to grow species from far-away places, instead of appreciating what grows in their ‘own back yard’.

“When I was growing up in Malaysia, all I wanted to do was grow English roses and a perfect striped lawn,” he says. “They’d struggle against the climate. It’s only recently that Malaysians are realising there are so many things around them that are more beautiful than any rose. I hope we’ve shown that our normal plants can win gold on the world stage.”

This got me thinking about the impact of flying and shipping plants and trees from one side of the world to the other to make our gardens look pretty.  There’s often talk about ‘food miles’ but what about ‘plant miles’?

My other favourite gardens at the show included the Global Stone Bee-Friendly Garden, which had a giant message reminding visitors of Albert Einstein’s prophecy that ‘when the last bee disappears off the face of the earth, man only has four years to live” (see my earlier feature on the decline of the honey bee).

I also loved Bradstone Biodiversity Garden which had insect-friendly flowers and log-piles, and a stone pavilion with crevices for nesting birds and bamboo canes to house insects.

The Eden Project garden was huge, if a little bonkers, with rows of old washing machine doors. It did well in the competition but I wasn’t sure if buying the biggest plot of the Show might have anything to do with it.

I was also fascinated by the Naturally Norway garden which was promoting the use of kebony instead of tropical timber for decking and pavilions. Kebony is made using the byproducts of sugar-cane production to harden sustainable wood species like pine and maple, and it looked stunning.

I wasn’t convinced by the Daily Telegraph garden, which seemed to have gone for the overgrown, disused railway track look. I didn’t find it particularly, beautiful, relaxing or interesting but I must have missed the point as it was the overall winner for 2010. Shows what I know…..

I knew about the impact elephants can have, tearing down vegetation.

I’ve read about the impact of cattle and invasive species like cane toads and crown-of-thorns starfish too.

But it was news to me that the common carp is also a bad guy! Apparently they uproot vegetation and can majorly affect their environment. They spend millions of dollars a year trying to control populations in the Australia and the States.

If elephants, locusts, cattle and goats are the bad guys, then bats, birds and lizards are the good guys….or so a feature I spotted on Wired Science says.

Bats, birds and lizards eat insects, thereby protecting plants from being eaten by those insects.

If birds make plants more likely to grow, then perhaps it’s safe to deduce that not having birds means plants won’t grow.

Which could tie up the total lack of bird visitors to my balcony with my total failure to grow any plants and veggies on said balcony….

I made a brilliant job of hanging a lardy-cake and sunflower hearts over the handrail too!

CEO Guido Bauer revealed the difference that a Green Globe certificate can make to a hotel’s bottom line: having the certificate lets hotels increase their room rates by 3-7%, reduces their operating costs by 3-11%, and adds 1-3% to the property’s value.

It’s great that they have proof of the financial benefit – in a cash-strapped economy like the Caribbean, a financial incentive for greening your business is particularly necessary.

I’m a little sceptical about such certification schemes though. Firstly, Green Globes are like several other schemes in that hotels pay to join the organisation which can’t fail to at least slightly compromise their impartiality.

Secondly, a hotel does not need to meet all or even most of the list of criteria in order to pass: they must satisfy just 51%. Some of the criteria are extremely difficult to satisfy (the newest criteria is PVC-free room keys) but you’ve got to ask – what about the other 49%?

I also had trouble with Guido’s comments that Caribbean countries are the most advanced region in the world in terms of sustainability, ahead of nearest contenders New Zealand / Australia / France.

Having stayed in countless hotels in the Caribbean which do not recycle, which turn the air-con on in my room while I’m not there, and which fly in food and beverages from around the world, I found this hard to believe.

Doubly hard after the lecture I attended in December in which Kristian Teleki of SeaWeb told us that outside Europe and North America, 80% of sewage enters the coastal ocean untreated – including in the Caribbean. Tourism is by far the biggest industry in the Caribbean so if 80% of its sewage is untreated, some of this must surely be coming from the hotels. Hardly sustainable!

I put this to Guido Bauer but he said he won’t accept that this is the case with the Caribbean…. I’m going to see if Kristian can point me in the direction of some further info.

Something I’ve never considered, however, is their ethical/green credentials. Luckily, the latest issue of Ethical Consumer has done the research for me.

Interestingly, when the magazine looked at biscuits a decade ago, the issues were very different. The emphasis then was on the use of genetically-modified ingredients. A lot of food companies have since moved away from GM products, though it remains an concern.

A massive new issue to be addressed is the use of palm oil by food manufacturers. Indonesia has already given up six million hectares of land to palm oil, displacing local people, creating soil erosion, and destroying natural habitats – of the orangutan in particular.

(I don’t want to put you off your breakfast but see the Born To Be Wild site for more on the brutal killing of orangutans to make way for palm oil plantations.) Clearly that’s to be avoided, so I’m keen to steer clear of products which contain palm oil – or unsustainable palm oil such as that from Indonesia.

Now, rightly or wrongly, I perceive more ethically and environmentally-conscious products to be more expensive, and in the case of biscuits it seems to be broadly true.

Duchy’s Originals get quite a high ‘ethiscore’ (in 8th place out of 31) and they are bloody good biscuits. I’ve enjoyed many a Sicilian Lemon Shortbread – mainly when I’ve bought them for my Nan for Christmas. But at £2.39 per 100g for Chocolate and Vanilla Shortbread, it’s hard to justify them as an everyday biscuit.

The biscuits with the 2nd and 4th-highest ethiscores were also extremely expensive: Island Bakery’s Organic Chocolate Gingers at £3.08 per 100g and Against The Grain’s Chocolate Chip and Hazlenut biscuits at £3.05 per 100g.

The fact that I’ve never even heard of these brands says something about their availability in supermarkets.

What was a pleasant surprise was that the brand which had the highest and 3rd highest scores were not nearly as expensive as some less ethical brands. Dove’s Farm Hazlenut Cookies are quoted at just £1.53 per 100g, so half the price of Island Bakery’s comparable product.

I hunted high and low at the big Harringey Sainsbury’s but couldn’t find these mysterious Doves Farm biccies. Or Island Bakery or Against The Grain, for that matter. Doves Farm might be reasonably priced but where on earth can you lay your hands on them?

The Doves Farm website says Mother Earth in Islington is one of its stockists so I will make it my weekend’s mission to purchase some of their champion biscuits. In the name of ethical research, you understand….

It seems that there are loads of good ones in the States already. An app like 3rdWhale, which finds the nearest vegan restaurants, fair trade shops and the like, sounds useful, but it doesn’t stretch to Finsbury Park at the moment. iRecycle sounds cool too, but again is limited to the US. I thought one from Greenpeace which finds the nearest stockists of recycled tissue paper is perhaps an application too far.

There are several apps which do work in the UK that track your carbon footprint. I’ve downloaded one called the Clear Standards Carbon Tracker which uses GPS to track how far you’ve travelled – pretty nifty, hey? You do still have to tell it what form on transport you’re on – an app which recognises whether you’re on a bus, train or plane cannot be fair away I’m sure.

I’ve also downloaded a Whole Foods app which has a nearest store locator, so you know exactly where to go for your mung beans. The best bit is the recipe generator where you type in what you’ve got in your cupboard, and it suggests something you can cook. ‘Weetabix’ isn’t an option though, sadly.

My overall favourite was a wildlife-spotting app from an organisation called WildObs. You spot some flora or fauna, take a photo of it on your iPhone, and submit it the WildObs site. They’ve also set something up with the National Wildlife Federation in the States whereby you submit the pic to the NWF’s Twitter feed, your iPhone tells it your precise location, and other people know where to go to try to spot what you spotted. Brilliant!

There only seems to one lady in the UK who’s done any spotting on WildObs so far. And that was of grizzly bears while she was in the States. I’m keen to get the UK on the map but I’m not sure how impressive a photo of the local mangy fox would be. Would photographing the animals in Clissold Park’s mini-zoo be cheating?

1. Leonardo Di Caprio

Yes he’s made some insufferable movies, but he’s one of the most active eco-warriors on the celeb circuit. He’s got his own foundation, and is on the board of various organisations like Global Green. He puts most of his time, effort and money into environmental documentaries and films like The 11th Hour now. Maybe spending that much time with a chunk of iceberg in Titanic really hit home the effects of climate change.

2. Stella McCartney

She’s big into animal rights and has also been an enthusiastic backer of the Meat Free Monday campaign which I’ve written about before. Apparently all her workshops and offices are powered by green energy supplier Ecotrocity and she’s working more and more with organic cotton. I know Heather Mills does some similar work on animal rights and veganism but I’m sorry, I can’t stand the woman.

3. Cameron Diaz

Cameron’s been an eco-goddess for years – she drives an eco-friendly Prius, she recycles, and she helped Al Gore launch his Save Our Souls initiative. She’s been busy this year, appearing on the covers of Vogue and Marie Claire in eco-couture. And I admire her for putting herself up for scrutiny by saying she simply doesn’t want kids. That’s one sure way we can solve the human population explosion.

4. Sting

I’ve always quite fancied Sting and he was one of my earliest eco influences – we watched a video at primary school of him singing Yanomamo about a tribe in Brazil. He and his missus did great work setting up the Rainforest Foundation but he rightfully got some flack recently, regarding the amount of carbon emissions created by Police’s global tour.

5. Daryl Hannah (aka the mermaid out of Splash)

Daryl has set up an entire website about leading an eco-friendly lifestyle. She was arrested just last week for protesting about the blowing up of mountains by coal companies in West Virginia. Her house is almost entirely solar-powered too.

6. Orlando Bloom

Orlando is heavily involved in Global Green, and last year he went to Antarctica to see evidence of the effects of global warming for himself. He’s built (or still building) an eco house right here in London though I’m yet to work out where…

7. Ed Norton

I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a single Edward Norton film, but this actor has been greening away for years. He set up a scheme called Solar Neighbours to bring solar power to low-income homes in the States.

8. Matt Damon

Matt has launched a clean water charity, water.org, just this month.  The charity aims to help the 890 million people who don’t have access to clean drinking water. It’s not the first campaign he’s thrown his weight behind – he supported GreenDime.com, a campaign against junk mail, too. Matt, we salute you.

9. Gwyneth Paltrow (and Chris Martin)

Husband Chris is very vocal about his strict vegetarianism but Gwyneth wins for her great ethical-living website, with weekly newsletters that she seems to write herself. Recently she’s teamed up with Cameron Diaz in a Hollywood-super-eco-tag team.

10. Michael Jackson

The King Of Pop (RIP) is on the list more because of what he could have been. ‘Earth Song’ was his biggest-selling record in the UK – bigger than Billie Jean and Bad and everything (shocker). I just think it’s a shame he didn’t continue championing environmental issues a bit more during his lifetime as he could have achieved a lot.

I try to be careful with my shopping, and am pretty good at cooking big batches and freezing meals for later in the week. But all it takes is for my evening plans to change last minute, and I end up with a fridge full of manky vegetables by the weekend. There’s also all the peelings, tea bags and left-overs that end up in the bin.

Skidelsky’s column prompted me to look at how I might be able to recycle our own food waste.

When I lived in the borough of Islington, I had a small, brown, food waste bin provided by the council but since crossing the border into Hackney, I haven’t had one.

Hackney Council’s recycling website says that blue bins for food waste are available to all street-level properties, but since I’m in a first floor flat I won’t qualify.

The council is apparently trialling the collection of food waste from selected estates and high-rise buildings but we’re not on the list. So I’ve emailed the council to ask what they suggest I can do. I hope traipsing around the housing estates of Hackney to find somewhere to dump my wizened lemons and skanky carrots is not its only suggestion.

The LGA has called for them to have to publicly disclose every three months how much packaging they’re producing.

They’re obliged to report to WRAP, the Government’s waste reduction body, but only Morrisons, Waitrose and Marks & Spencer have gone public.

Just last night we were looking at exactly how much stuff we CAN’T recycle in our bin outside.

In an average week, we probably get through:

• 2 TetraPak orange juice containers
• 2 margerine tub-style containers
• 4 or 5 plastic trays from meat and fish
• 10 yoghurt cartons
• 5 plastic punnets from tomatoes, strawberries etc
• And swathes of other plastic wrappings.

I’m still trying to work out whether those three supermarkets are any more environmentally-conscious than the others, or if they’re just more honest.

Click for PDF

The LGA did a full report in February (click image to download) which compared the amount of packaging by the major supermarkets on a basket of the same 29 items.

Tesco did best in terms of weight of packaging, which is a surprise considering what a bad rep Tesco has.

Waitrose packaging weighed the most, which was another surprise for me. You pay over the odds for a loaf of poncey bread – you kind of expect the company to at least be putting that cash into ethical and eco-friendly practises, don’t you?

Sainsbury’s did best in terms of how much of its packaging on those 29 items could be recycled.

What’s clear is that if the supermarkets could be made to cut back on the amount of packaging they use, those of us who don’t live anywhere near the appropriate recycling facility wouldn’t feel quite so bloody guilty.

Energy giant EDF Energy is behind the campaign, and there’s been major controversy because the green Union Jack logo they’ve used is very similar to the one of Ecotricity, a renewable energy supplier. Ecotricity is trying to sue EDF for what it claims is a misleading of consumers.

EDF describes itself as Europe’s “lowest carbon-producing energy company” but it still doesn’t really wash. In fact,the Guardian’s Fred Pearce says:

“one of EDF’s largest arms is EDF Trading, which is based in London and advertises itself as “one of the largest participants in the global coal market……dare I suggest, EDF should join the party and “do something green” itself by committing to getting out of coal. Maybe in time for the London Olympics?”

I feel for Ecotricty – they’ve been investing in renewable energy since 1996 then EDF comes along and rips off its motif in a gimmicky campaign. I hope their legal action is successful and also raises their own profile.