Wheel life: A guide to Britain's new bike tribes

Friday, 6 June 2008

Clean team: the young entrepreneurs set to mop up the eco-market

Thursday, 5 June 2008

That Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan should receive a Valentine's Day card is not surprising. Both in their thirties, they are brainy, clean-cut, all-American business types. That the card should be made of cut-up packaging is unusual. But that it should express love for their range of household cleaning products is plain off the wall. And yet this is not unusual: Method, Lowry and Ryan's eco-friendly brand of floor polishes, disinfectants, leather cloths and other friendly cleaners, which is now being rolled out across Britain seems to attract fanatical followers.

James Daley: Cyclotherapy

Thursday, 5 June 2008

I had some friends in town, visiting from Texas last week, and decided that there could be no better way to show them my city than by taking them on the Critical Mass cycle ride. For those of you who aren't familiar, the London "Mass" (as it's often known) meets on the last Friday of every month, setting off from under Waterloo Bridge at around 7pm. It's simply a gathering of cyclists (around 700 last week, I reckon), who reclaim the streets of the capital and block off the traffic for a few hours, allowing the cyclist to enjoy their great city without the hindrance of any motorised vehicles.

A Welsh village has hit back at rising food prices - by rearing its own pigs

Thursday, 5 June 2008

In early October, weather permitting, a number of residents from the village of Grosmont in south Wales are planning a party with a magnificent hog-roast as the centrepiece. The village, home to around 200 households, is cushioned on all sides by Monmouthshire's Black Mountains and, with local life revolving around a small pub, The Angel, and the church, little excuse is required for a knees-up. Still, this particular celebration will be a very special one, marking the completion of the first cycle in Grosmont's plan to become a sustainable "eco-village". The hog-roast itself will be far more than tasty party food: it will be the end of the road for one of 13 piglets from two litters born this spring, which the villagers will rear themselves over the summer months; before slaughtering and butchering the animals and sharing out the meat.

Huge increase in wind power planned

Wednesday, 4 June 2008

A new programme to open up the UK's seas to more wind farms was launched today as part of a bid to increase massively the supply of offshore renewable power.

Greener power to the people: the real energy alternative?

Sunday, 1 June 2008

Ministers could avoid building nuclear reactors by encouraging families to fit solar panels and other renewable energy equipment to their homes, a startling official report concludes.

Pie in the sky: The world's first edible high-rise

Sunday, 1 June 2008

The potential of city-based farming could be vastly expanded if we extend upwards as well as using ground-level plots.

The urban farmer: One man's crusade to plough up the inner city

Sunday, 1 June 2008

Fritz Haeg isn't perhaps the obvious representative of a revolution in global farming. As an architecture and design academic and practitioner, the American has had his work exhibited at Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and has taught fine art at several US universities. Yet it is last year's community-collaborative project on an inner-city council estate in south London that best showcases his current passion: the urban farm.

Fed up with too much packaging? Just leave it on the counter

Sunday, 1 June 2008

"I'm Not a Plastic Bag" hardly seems a slogan worth bothering with these days: reusable carriers now seem as ordinary a feature of a trip to the shops as a trolley with a wobbly wheel. The tipping point was arguably Plan A, not just any anti-plastic campaign, but a Marks & Spencer anti-plastic bag campaign: when the Grand Old Dame of the British high street starts charging 5p per unnecessary receptacle, people pay attention.

Germany's cities show Britain how to do green

Sunday, 1 June 2008

After a week in green Germany, returning to Britain brings more than the usual end-of-holiday bump. It feels like leaving a society humanely and intelligently engaged with the 21st century to one still groping its way through the last one.