There has been a big push from our government this week to reduce the amount of food we throw away. Gordon Brown, on his way to the G8 Summit in Japan to work on alleviating the very real problem of global food scarcity, pointed out that food waste ‘is costing the average household in Britain around £8 per week.' That equates to 4.1m tonnes of perfectly good food thrown away every year. This is all unnecessary waste (and doesn't even include what we over eat which can waste both our health and world supplies).

So it's now time to reduce, reuse and recycle our food! Reduce consumption, reuse leftovers, and recycle into our composts.

Some of our food waste avoidance tips are:

• Work out what you want to cook for the week ahead before you buy your fresh food and bring home the right quantity to avoid floppy carrot syndrome


• Utilise bulk buys only if you are 100% sure you will use the whole of the product before its end date


• Shop on a full stomach... not only to avoid the strategically placed chocolate bars at the checkout but also to ensure your brain is on full alert to keep you on target for a list-only shop


• If leftovers don't appeal two days in a row; either make less, freeze it or get creative - roast beef pie filling, thai chicken soup or, my father's favourite Chilli Mistake'a (just add chilli!)


• Eat only what you need. Make only what you need. Appreciation and enjoyment of food tends to increase as the regularity of indulgences decrease.

Send us in your tips to minimize food waste and we'll add them to our list!

The world's first eco nightclub has opened in London, Kings Cross this month. Surya (Sanskrit translation for Sun God) is its name and earth conscious partying is it's game.

Novelties include a dance floor made of crystals and ceramic that people dance on to create a charge, to generate electricity which powers the club. An elbow nudging, fast-footed bunch of clubbers could provide sixty percent of the Surya's electricity supply. The club also incorporates wind turbines and solar power, which has the potential to provide energy for up to twenty local residents.

Bathrooms include air flushes, waterless urinals and low-flush toilets. Recycling is big on the agenda - glass, plastic, cans etc are granted another life beyond landfill.

Entrance is £10 and clubbers can only enter if they sign a pledge to work towards curbing climate change. Oh and cyclists and walkers enter free - yep, free admission.

Club4Climate is the eco group behind the set up of this club and super rich property developer/eco warrior Andrew Charalambous is the brains and money behind it. Andrew invested £1 million of his own money to create his eco vision based on an 'inclusive' philosophy to combating our climate issues.

A cool (pardon the super bad pun) way to reduce climate change don't you think?

Despite the current economic downturn it seems those of us who believe in the virtues of fair trade and organic goods have not drifted from our values or changed our good habits. A recent eco shopping report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers found that we are in fact spending more on Fairtrade and organic clothes and Fairtrade food (up 17 and 20 per cent respectively in last 3 years). There has been no indication from retailers of slumping organic sales - in fact quite the opposite. The Soil Association forecast that organic sales will be up 10 percent this year.

According to MoneyExpert.com a Virgin Money study found ‘80 per cent of green shoppers remain committed to ethical purchases, even though it means adding an estimated £12 to the monthly food bill.' These figures highlight that on the whole we are prepared to make sacrifices for the sake of the green movement.

With more people interested in the sustainability agenda and plenty of coverage in the media companies are pushing their green credentials more than ever. If the cost of carbon and other non-eco friendly activities are one day incorporated into the cost of products we may just end up paying less to support our eco/health conscious lifestyles.

Would it be terribly naïve of me to believe local and organic products could turn the economy around?

Glass Recycling has been a topic of hot debate this month with concerns being raised about the quality of recycled household glass and how it being delivered to recycling plants. It has been circulated that councils practicing commingled recycling (that is mixing different colours of glass) can only use the recycled material to make roads or send to landfill.

It's easy to be mislead by this kind of talk and regrettably some may be discouraged from participating at all when they consider the time and effort invested each month to sort their household waste.

The fact is that mixed glass cannot be re-melted and used as new glass bottles as colour purity is crucial. However, pre-melt colour separation technology (such as digital scanning cameras) can be used to separate the clear from the green, making it suitable for the container industry. Unfortunately not all recycling plants have this technology and those that do require substantial investment and produce high levels of waste.

The good news is that glass separating technology is improving and colour contamination is becoming less of a problem. Also the more glass we send off to be recycled the greater the need for new recycling plants with better technology to meet our enthusiastic recycling demands.

Ultimately the more glass we bother to recycle, the more likely we'll be drinking from it again. 

Israeli scientists from Tel-Aviv University claim they have created a computer that judges how attractive a women is.

The program was created by mapping the geometric shape and symmetry of facial features from the photographs of one hundred different women which had been rated from one to seven in terms of attractiveness by a group of men and women (the human kind). The computer is trained with various predictors such as skin texture and is given the average human attractiveness score for each face. In comparison to previous machine learning inventions the ratings produced by this new computer program highly correlate with human scored ratings.

So who, we hear you ask, really cares if a superficial computer thinks they are a yummy mummy or not? Plastic sugeons are most likely to get the most from this computer beauty judger by using it as a guide in reconstructive surgery.

Somehow the idea of applying technology to my face doesn't really appeal. Think I'll stick to the traditional application of natural cleansers and face moisturisers.