BLOG IN A BOTTLE

Meet Melissa Gunning, a Canadian business woman and all ‘round super mum, in our opinion. She’s the founder of ‘Wean Green’, a company that offers eco-friendly baby food containers.

The Wean Green containers are made with durable, tempered glass, so they can easily be stored in the fridge as well as heated up in the micro, without worrying about contaminating the food. Smart clips lock all the food inside, and they glass cubed and stackable – fitting perfectly into your baby bag.

The idea popped into Gunning’s head eight years ago, when she started feeding her daughter solids. Though she used glass to store food for her and her husband, she froze her infant daughter Rayne’s organic homemade food in plastic ice cube trays – even though she worried about what the plastic might contain. “My friends make fun of how eco-friendly I am,” Gunning says. “But I think it’s extremely important to get rid of plastics for kids.”

By the time her second daughter was born, stylish, ecological choices were available for everything from cotton diapers to swaddling blankets – but not baby-portion glass containers good for freezing and reheating food.

So the former elementary school teacher started calling tempered glass container manufacturers, asking them to start making baby food containers. (The tempering process makes glass strong enough to withstand dramatic temperature swings.) Eventually, a Canadian glass manufacturer offered to help her reach a company that agreed to produce her design.

Wean Green’s cubes are now moulded at a factory in China that makes glass up to Gunning’s safety standards – no lead or cadmium. A factory in New York tempers the jars, making them strong enough to put in the hands of an infant.

From The Calgary Herald

The Telegraph has a helpful and practical list:

1. Compost your rubbish to reduce your use of plastic bags.
2. Don’t use too many bin liners – just tip your rubbish into the bin.
3. Bring unusable cloth bags to the shops with you.
4. Choose glass whenever you can: for drinks, wine, beans, veggies, whatever. The more glass, the better.
5. Carry your own thermal mug and ask coffee retailers to fill it for you rather than taking a disposable cup. Bring your own coffee mug to work with you.
6. Buy loose fruit and vegetables whenever you can.
7. Make your own bread or buy it from bakeries that package it in paper.
8. Clean your home with baking soda and vinegar instead of using cleaning products.
9. Buy washing powder in boxes.
10. Buy cheese and meat from your local delicatessen and have it wrapped in paper.
11. Use bar soap to wash your dishes – and yourself.
12. Use scented candles or incense instead of artificial air fresheners.
13. Don’t wrap left-over foods in cling film – use aluminium or wax paper instead.
14. Give your pets cloth-based toys, like catnip mice and soft balls.
15. Stuff delicate postal packages with old newspapers or junk mail instead of bubble wrap.

Any more ideas? Please add yours in the comments below.

Remember the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? The floating 44 million kilograms of plastic waste floating in the Pacific Ocean which kills wildlife and damages the food chain?

Bad news is that Europe’s own Med Sea is facing the same disaster.

There is an alarming phenomenon in the Mediterranean with the presence of an almost invisible pollution entering food chains – pollution by plastic microdebris.

Initial scientific estimates show that about 250 billion floating microplastics contaminate the surface of the Mediterranean.

Is the Mediterranean Sea becoming a plastic soup ingested by fish and even plankton, the base of the whole food chain?

It could be. Unless we act now for European-wide support and research.

Sign this online petition to get legislative support from the European Union and financial support for a Pan European awareness campaign. It’s fast and it’s free. And it’s necessary.

Learn more about this project.

If, like us, you enjoy hosting dinner parties at home, you’ll know that a beautiful table setting is as important as the food you serve. Nothing expresses your personality, finesse and style more than the way you choose to decorate your table.

Whether it’s a floral centrepiece, bedazzled placeholders or home-made serviette rings, your table décor sets the tone for the dinner party ahead.

Here’s your chance to dress your dinner party table to impress: show your taste with glass and win a décor gift voucher worth €300!

Entering is easy: simply upload a photo of your table décor with a few layout tips of how your look was achieved. The photos with the most ‘likes’ wins!

Browse the gallery

Style tips

Add yours & win

It’s Super Glass! Actually, to be more precise, it’s a metallic, microallow glass featuring palladium.

US researchers have developed this new glass which is “damage-tolerant” and has a “strength and toughness beyond that of any known material”. Blimey. Best not get hit by a bottle with this glass, then.

The researchers, from the United States Department of Energy and the Califnornia Institute of Technology were pretty excited – and for good reason:

“These results mark the first use of a new strategy for metallic glass fabrication and we believe we can use it to make glass that will be even stronger and more tough,” says scientist Robert Ritchie.

“Because of the high bulk-to-shear modulus ratio of palladium-containing material, the energy needed to form shear bands is much lower than the energy required to turn these shear bands into cracks,” Ritchie says. “The result is that glass undergoes extensive plasticity in response to stress, allowing it to bend rather than crack.”

This means that better (even stronger) versions of this new glass could be just around the corner. Imagine what that could mean for sustainability.

Via: Science Daily

US organic food giant Eden Foods has chosen glass for their crushed tommy and sauces.

“.. the driving force at Eden Foods for these amber glass jars of tomatoes was the avoidance of bisphenol-A (BPA) in high acid food cans.”

Good news is you like your tommy and sauces as pure as possible.

We’ve carried news before about BPA, specifically recent research that it could be more harmful than originally thought.

Glass is the only packaging material that doesn’t need extra layers to protect your tommy and sauces. Choose glass whenever you can.

p.s. Here are 5 good reasons to choose glass.

Via: Packaging Digest

A very big hello and warm welcome to Galvanina Mineral Water, our newest corporate Friend of Glass, from Rimini in Italy.

As you well know, we love our glass bottled waters and are firm believers that water does taste different, depending on its source (and of course, in the material that it’s packaged).

The source of Galvanina is pretty impressive. It was discovered more the 2000 years ago and was used by ancient Romans when they established in the region of Rimini. Here’s what Galvanina says:

The snow and rains that fall copiously on the Northern Apennine Mountains follow a long path through deep rocks and uncontaminated underground channels, on a slow but steady journey of over two years, until Galvanina Mineral Water flows pure and clear from the summit of San Lorenzo Monte near Rimini, a hill known locally as “Paradise”.

What’s pretty impressive about Galvanina is that they don’t just talk the talk: you can actually see the underground water flow. Take a look:

And of course, Galvanina is packaged perfectly in a glass bottle that won’t interfere at all with the taste inside.

Thirsty yet?

Do you share the same memories as ours that no childhood breakfast table was ever complete without a glass bottle of milk? Yummy.

Although glass milk bottles are still an important part of the morning ritual, news from the UK is that the government there is calling for better recyclability of plastic milk bottles. Good news, it would seem. But some packagers and producers aren’t so happy about it.

The plans call for an increase in the recycled content of plastic milk bottles, in the form of recycled HDPE (rHDPE) pellets, from 10% to 30% by 2015. Thing is, these pellets give the plastic bottles a green hue, according to a research report from WRAP (the Waste & Reductions Action Plan – their website is worth a visit).

This is because the green bottle caps ‘contaminate’ the rHDPE-bottle, making it all greeny. And the only greeny things we like at the breakfast table are apples.

We’re big believers in recyclability, but in a type of recyclability that is more cradle-to-cradle instead of cradle-to-grave.

A cradle-to-cradle recycling system means that a packaging material – just like glass – can pretty much be recycled as many times as possible, and not just once (the cradle-to-grave system).

The good news is that Europe is getting better at recycling glass bottles. 62% of glass in Europe is collected for recycling; 97% of that is actually recycled.

Via: LetsRecycle.com