Discarded plastic bags were causing the deaths of birds, turtles, dolphins and other marine creatures which swallowed or became entangled in the rubbish blown out to sea. I’ve dived the Red Sea a couple of times and been disappointed to see litter – it really makes your heart sink.

But the governor of the Red Sea brought in legislation in January, and the campaign seems to be doing extremely well.

HEPCA (Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association) has now given out 50,000 cloth bags free-of-charge; most local restaurants and shops have started giving out paper bags instead, and people are re-using their plastic ones.

In a perfect example of how going green usually has even wider benefits, the making of these fabric bags has generated much-needed employment for local women.

It’s a lovely ‘good-news’ story, but what a contrast to the photo-story on The Guardian site yesterday that highlighted the monstrous swathes of plastic floating around in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

A mass of plastic bottles, caps and beer can loops the size of Texas is hidden beneath the surface of the water, breaking down into tiny parts that get into the food chain at the lowest level.

The effect on bird life is also catastrophic. Albatrosses pick up the litter and feed it to their young, thinking it’s food. On the nearby coral atoll known as Midway are the corpses of thousands of albatross chicks which have died from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

The photographer, Chris Jordan, did not interfere with the corpses in any way – the photos show the exact contents of the chick’s stomach when it died what must have been its very painful death. There are more photos in all their technicolour glory on his website.

You don’t see so much about ‘Keeping Britain Tidy’ any more. It’s perhaps a less pressing concern in the face of irreversible climate change, but these photos have been a chilling reminder to me of why litter is still very much something we should be worrying about.

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?

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.

Apple was put under lots of pressure by Greenpeace a few years back, and ended up releasing a ‘green Notebook’, made with minimal toxins and with maximum recyclable materials.

However, Greenpeace’s most recent Guide to Greener Electronics still rates Apple quite poorly.

And the iPhone doesn’t feature in lists of ‘green mobiles’, like this recent list on The Daily Green. Motorola, Sony Ericsson and Nokia were in there (including a Motorola made of recycled water bottles) but no sign of Apple.

So it looks like I’ve made a bad decision, from a green point of view. Sigh.

I got a special ‘Simply Drop’ bag through my letter box just a few days ago for mobile phones and old digital cameras, so I can recycle my old handset and give the money to an environmental charity. So I’ll gain some green/brownie points there at least…..

These are the recycling facilities provided outside my block of flats – nice and handy.

As you can see, there’s a fair bit you can recycle here, but there’s also lots you can’t. Excluded are: yoghurt pots, cling film, margerine tubs, broken glass, food packaging, window glass, Pyrex, lightbulbs, Tetra Paks, and kitchen and garden waste. Which means there’s a heck of a lot of our weekly rubbish that doesn’t qualify.

And then there’s the grey areas. Those cardboard/plastic hybrids like the sandwich cartons you get somewhere like Pret – can that go in as cardboard? And what about the metal screw-lids on glass jars – do they count as aluminium or are they a different metal entirely?

I’ve just been down with a big blue Ikea bag of tins, jars and wine bottles, plus a smashed pint glass (a casualty of the weekend).

Only after I’d emptied everything into the bin did I read the sign that said smashed glass is not allowed. I once read somewhere that putting the wrong thing in the wrong recycling bin contaminates the whole batch and none of it can be recycled. God, the pressure!

The Recycle Week website asks you to choose one thing to pledge to do to better your recycling credentials. I opted to pledge to look out for new recycling labels when I’m shopping – that should be a good excercise in what can and can’t be recycled. I’m also going to do a bit of research on what else I could recycle nearby, so watch this space.

In the meantime, if that broken glass has indeed contaminated everybody else’s good work, apologies. I was trying!