© Kes

We all have coloured recycling bins outside, but how many of us make it easier by having recycling bins in the kitchen too? Most people I know just have the one kitchen bin which makes keeping paper, glass, cans etc separate quite tricky. Or your kitchen very messy!

Enter the Kes large capacity recycling kitchen bin, which has the novel idea of two bins in one. Two 26 litre bins, side by side, are fixed on runners to slide in and out of your kitchen cupboard. So recycling becomes a cinch, your kitchen stays immaculate, and you get to do your bit for the planet.

Kes also do a nice range of attractively designed kitchen bins if you prefer to have them on show. Stainless steel or plastic to complement your kitchen décor, they’re keenly priced so a couple of matching Kes kitchen bins would serve equally well to maintain your recycling credentials.

I know that kitchen bins don’t rank high on the all time list of Christmas gift ideas, but vital activities like recycling need to be kept up all through the year, and your shopping blog will be sure to keep you updated with all the best shopping news on green products.

Rob

Rated: from 1827 votes

As you know, your shopping blog is always on the lookout for Christmas gift ideas, so I’ve been looking through the “Dream List” of the TRA (Toy Retailers’ Association) which they publish every year to promote this Christmas’s must have toys.

As usual, some I agree with and some I don’t. The main thing to me about a toy for kids is that they should be able to do something with it and interact rather than just sitting looking at it.

So here are my top 3 for this year.

3 - The recycling truck from Playmobil

At about £30 it’s a brightly coloured truck that kids can push about to their hearts’ content, and we all know how much kids like pushing cars and trucks around the floor. Complete with two jolly dustmen and three brightly coloured bins, this is the perfect Christmas gift for the junior recycler and will give your kids an early start into the green scene.

© Teletubbies

2 - Dance with me Teletubbies

For fans of Tinky Winky, Dipsy, La La and Po, and if you don’t know who they are, what desert island are you from?

For about £35 you can choose your Teletubby (all four are available), put him on the floor and turn him on and he’ll dance and jiggle about in time to the music. Your child won’t be able to resist dancing along, and it would be special fun for kids’ parties to occupy them all for half an hour. Kids love dancing and kids love Teletubbies, so this is one great Christmas gift that Santa should be putting on his Christmas gift list for kids.

© Bob the Builder

And - wait for it - my number 1 Christmas gift is …….

1 - Bob the builder interactive construction playset.

At about £50, this great little toy can provide hours of endless fun for Bob the Builder fans. It comes with Tumbler, Scoop and Muck along with Bob himself of course, and there are lots of things to move and fix. This playset detects when something is moved and plays an appropriate noise or sound clip, and kids can mix “cement”, use the working crane or even raise the truck on the vehicle lift. You’ll get no peace on Christmas day with one of these, but your kids will love it!

Rob

Rated: from 1670 votes

© Freeplay Devo wind-up DAB radio

And by this I mean entertainment gadgets such as radios where you’d normally use a battery.
We’ve all heard of the wind-up radio which for remote places out of the reach of electricity and shops sounds a great idea. But I’m not so sure I’d like having to interrupt Colbie Caillat mid-song to wind the thing up again.

Now the wind-up theme’s been extended to MP3 players, media players, and there’s even a wind-up remote control. Though it seems a bit over the top to me, winding up your remote control while you watch your 50 inch Plasma HD TV.

I’m in two minds as well about solar powered headphones and iPod rechargers. We just don’t have the climate for gadgets like that, and what if your iPod runs down at night?

There are dedicated greens who will disagree, but I think that these things are a step too far. A battery charger would make a great Christmas gift idea, and is plenty green enough for me. That Christmas present would enable you to run all your gadgets from rechargeable batteries but I don’t know anybody who’d thank me for solar powered headphones or a wind-up remote control.

But hey it’s your shopping blog too, and I’m always interested in what my shopping blog readers think. What do you think?

Rob

Rated: from 1429 votes

flickr © choffee

If like me you’ve got a lot of roses, you’ll just have given them their autumn pruning. Pruning roses is not difficult, in spite of rumours to the contrary, and tests have actually demonstrated that rose bushes pruned carefully with secateurs do no better the following year than rose bushes “pruned” with a Flymo! Though that sounds highly dangerous to me and isn’t to be recommended.

Either way, you’re left with a huge pile of cuttings to dispose of. Many people burn these, much to the annoyance of neighbours and Friends of the Earth; while others transport them to their local recycling plant in multiple carloads. Why on earth they do either of these things is beyond me, when the garden shredder provides the perfect green solution.

For under £80, you can get an electric garden shredder that will eat up all those cuttings and chop them finely ready to add to the compost heap. No waste and all the goodness goes straight back into compost ready to be spread on the roses next year.

A garden shredder is the ideal gift idea for the eco-conscious gardener, and could even be an early Christmas present.
But a word of warning, when you go shopping for the shredder, go shopping for a pair of ear muffs too as all shredders are noisy. Shredding your garden waste isn’t something to do first thing Sunday morning.

Rob

Rated: from 1556 votes

Be green and buy rechargable batteries flickr © ahhyeah

Well I hope all the readers of this shopping blog use only rechargeable batteries. And if you don’t, then shame on you and you should change immediately. There’s no excuse these days for single use batteries, as rechargeable batteries come in every conceivable shape and size. So whatever the gadgets you want them for, they’re readily available.

Battery life in rechargeables is now excellent, and as well as saving the planet, rechargeable batteries will save you pounds with most of them being rechargeable several hundred times at a negligible cost in electricity.

The only thing to remember when shopping for batteries and chargers is to go for high capacity batteries and a high speed charger. Even if you keep a spare set of batteries charged and ready, you don’t want to hang around for hours waiting for your economy cut price charger to do the job. A high speed charger only costs a pound or two more and charges in about an hour.

And the capacity of the batteries is clearly marked on each pack – the higher the capacity, the longer they’ll last between charges,

For the man who has everything, a set of rechargeable batteries and a high speed charger would be an ideal Christmas gift, or why not get some to power your kids’ Christmas toys? It’s certainly one of the gift ideas this shopping blog writer will be giving anyone who asks.

Rob

Rated: from 1331 votes

Shopping bag from recycled material - you can find items like this on Great Green Goods © Gecko

Like most of you, I’m a keen advocate of staying green and saving the planet, so I was fascinated to find a new shopping blog devoted to recycled products. At Great Green Goods, everything they sell is made from 100 per cent recycled materials.

Such unlikely articles as old broken lawnmowers (made into a table lamp) can be found alongside broken pottery and tiles (made into cufflinks or pendants), and if that’s the kind of thing you’re looking for, then Great Green Goods has them all.

I admire the ingenuity that’s gone into the design of all these products, but suspect that I won’t be shopping there myself. The problem is that all the stuff there screams at you that it has been made from junk and broken things. The recycled materials stand out as a statement rather than being integrated subtly into new products.

So while they’re certainly a talking point, I wouldn’t want anybody to give me a table lamp made from rusty lawnmower bits as my Christmas present.  It’s a US site so the prices are in dollars, but I reckon that for the $225 the lamp costs, I could probably buy both a new lawnmower and a respectable table lamp.

Shopping news this site may be, but packed with gift ideas and great Christmas presents it’s not. It would take a special dedication to all things green for someone to appreciate Christmas gifts so rustic and obviously recycled, and I for one will be looking for my gift ideas somewhere else.

Have a look and let me know what you think.

Rob

Rated: from 1525 votes

© Muddy Fox

We all want to save the planet and use the car less, but public transport isn’t all it could be and walking takes such a long time if you’re going anywhere further than the pub on the corner. So why don’t more of us have bikes?

Bicycles are definitely getting more popular with those in the know, and in the best circles it’s smart to be seen to get on your bike. Many outlets now offer a huge variety of bikes at prices to suit all pockets, whether you want to copy Chris Hoy and win the Olympics, potter about the country lanes or beat the traffic in the daily commute.

Wikimedia © johnthescone

Chris Hoy’s bike would set you back at least £10,000; but for well under £100 you could have a smart steel bike with alloy wheels that would do everything you wanted. Light, easy to ride, tough and strong enough to put up with all you can throw at it.

Even a Muddy Fox off-road bike, one of the best in its field, can be had for a couple of hundred pounds. For that, you get an all alloy frame for supreme lightness and toughness and 21 speed Shimano gears.

And don’t forget that cycling is fantastic exercise. So when you go shopping for a bike, as well as saving the earth you’ll be doing yourself a whole lot of good as well.

Rob

Rated: from 1652 votes

© Dimplex

It may seem an odd idea that you reduce your energy usage with an electric convector heater, but that is certainly what I’ve found.

The thing is, rather than have the central heating blasting away, heating all the places where you are not as well as heating up its own pipes, you turn the convector heater on when you need it and off when you don’t. Nothing could be simpler, and you discover that you need it on far less than you think.

I’ve got a Dimplex 3 kilowatt heater in my conservatory and I find it’s ideal for the chilly mornings, or when the nights are drawing in and you feel cold but don’t want to fire up the central heating.

The Dimplex comes equipped with a thermostat, so once the room has reached a comfortable temperature it turns itself off, and two heat settings so that you can turn it on full at first, then down to the lower setting to keep the room comfortable.

The room heats up surprisingly quickly, much more quickly than with the central heating system, and stays that way with the convector turning itself on only as much as it needs to.

Dimplex is a well respected maker of convector heaters, and I’ve always used them, so if you want to stay greener as the cooler days arrive, I’d recommend you shop for Dimplex.

Rob

Rated: from 1522 votes

flickr © jeb-ro

If you’re driving about and guzzling petrol, you’re not going to be completely green, lets face it.

I know I go on about tyres a lot but they’re a pet peeve of mine. And considering the price you pay for them, you don’t want to be shelling out on 4 new tyres more often than you have to. But Dunlop tyres have revealed you could be saving money and helping the environment by checking your tyres are inflated properly.

Dunlop tyres did the research on fuel usage and found that if your tyres are under-inflated it can affect your fuel economy, costing you money and costing the environment. These guys live tyres so they’re worth listening to, and if just one of your tyres is under inflated it can lead to a drop of up to 10 per cent in fuel efficiency.

Obviously this is a very extreme case, but it’s amazing that by filling your tyres up correctly you can cut the amount of petrol you waste. If you can afford to waste petrol at the moment you certainly earn more than I do, so at the same time as cutting your contribution to global warming by cutting carbon dioxide, you’ll save money too.

As for actually disposing of the things, that’s another story altogether. Apart form running tracks there’s very little you can make from old tyres. Bring on recycled tyres, that’s what I say. Tyre manufacturers have been using ultra-fine recycled rubber powder in specialist tyres for a while but I think full recycling is a log way off. So come on Dunlop – tyres could be recyclable rather than landfill. I’d certainly buy them.

Rob

Rated: from 1911 votes

stock.xchng © mrceviz

We’re all trying to do our bit to save the planet, so I was intrigued while out shopping the other day to find a little gadget called the Bye Bye Standby energy saving kit.

Some experts estimate that in the UK, we use all of 10% of our electricity on gadgets and electrical equipment on standby. That figure surprised me, but then I looked around at the PC, the TV, the PVR, the DVD player, Hi-fi and all the other stuff that I’ve got waiting around, using electricity, until the time comes when I want to turn them on.

Standby does save you a few seconds as you don’t have to wait so long for your TV or whatever to come on. But standby uses an awful lot of our precious electricity. And this is where the Bye Bye Standby comes in.

This clever gadget is an adaptor that you plug into the wall socket, and then plug your electrical appliance into it. A press of the Bye Bye Standby’s remote control cuts power completely to the device, so you stop electricity consumption immediately without even having to leave your armchair. No more standby, so lower electricity bills and less harm to the environment. It’s got to be worth a look next time you go shopping.

Rob

Rated: from 1582 votes