Look Great Naturally…Without Ditching the Lipstick
is another in the Imperfect series and looks at ways you can tick the glam but still natural box!
The new book is called Look Great Naturally…Without Ditching the Lipstick
(Hay House) and is released on 1^st June.   That the first 100 people to buy a copy  through Amazon will win a prize consisting of a bunch of natural goodies, also everyone who buys it that week wins exclusive downloads (including Podcasts and an exclusive track from Janeys new album !)

An update and round up?

It’s snowing again, very lightly and not even trying to settle but it means it’s very cold – but the boiler is staying fixed so we have heating!

We’ve noticed a dramatic reduction in the volume of waste we put in our bin since getting sorted to recycle the hard plastic at our local tesco. It takes a few minutes as part of a shopping trip, easy, and because each item is scanned and sorted I suspect that it all gets recycled properly rather than being shipped off to China or somewhere else that’s classed as “away”.

We’ve also started something I stumbled on over on the Twitter site – Meatfreemonday. If you’re on Twitter you can search for the hash tag #meatfreemonday. But effectively it’s a commitment to having at least one day each week where you don’t consume meat or meat products. So far we’ve had cereal and milk for breakfast and fruit for a morning snack – that’s part of an overall health drive anyway. Lunch will be out but DD and I will choose carefully. Not sure what DS will choose at school dinners but today has a good non meat selection. He might forget and go for the fish cakes though. Does fish count? Shall we exclude school dinners? Shall we call it mammalmeatfreemonday instead?

Oh and lastly for today, do you want a chance to win some luxury, hand made, organic, chocolates? Then pop over to My Zero Waste and drop them a line in the comments.

Happy Monday folks!

And what is Ethical anyway? Or Green, or Eco friendly? They are such nebulous terms and although they do bring to mind a more responsible way of working, producing and consuming there is no standard definition in terms of business. Even the dictionary doesn’t give us many clues.

ethical

adjective

1. pertaining to or dealing with morals or the principles of morality; pertaining to right and wrong in conduct.
2. being in accordance with the rules or standards for right conduct or practice, esp. the standards of a profession

Morals? Whose morals? Whose rules? Whose standards? No real clues to what Ethical means there…..

For me and for Ethics Trading it’s about my own personal Ethics and beliefs. It’s about being open and honest, transparent in my dealings with you, my customers and my suppliers. I don’t lie or cheat and I try to find products that are more natural and sourced responsibly.

There’s another can of worms, Responsibly…. By that I mean that I try to find ou how a product is produced and to make sure that all the people along the production chain are treated fairly, paid a fair wage for their area and not subjected to chemical drenching in the name of progress and a bigger harvest. I mean that as far as I can be sure, no children were forced to work as part of the production of any product or ingredient sold through Ethics trading. I mean that as far as I can be sure no part of the Earth was harmed or destroyed to grow or produce any product or ingredient sold through Ethics Trading. I mean that as far as I can be sure that no women were forced to forgo an education in order to work, not forced to leave their children in order to work and are not subjected to conditions of slavery or hardship.

That is My Ethical. There are so many facets to it that I could go on for pages but I think you’ld be bored…. Do feel free to open up a debate in the comments….

A dead turtle.

No, it’s not funny.

Did you know that:

• Every single piece of plastic ever manufactured is still somewhere on our beautiful planet.
• The USA uses 100 Billion plastic bags every year.
• There is an estimated 46,000 pieces of plastic in every square mile of our oceans.
• Plastic bags cause over 100,000 sea turtle and marine animal deaths every year.

The Greenhouse Neutral Foundation has a vision that by midnight on December 31st 2010 all plastic bags will be banned, globally and forever. You can help make that happen by signing this petition, blogging the link and spreading the word.

Thanks to My Zero Waste for the information.

Only a few minutes left…..

But one hen isn’t laying any more and another has developed a problem that means she can’t be kept in with the others for much longer. So today we’ve been measuring up the kids ex-play house with a mind to converting that into better, more spacious, chicken accommodation. It would mean that we can lose one hen and gain two or even three to replace her – giving us three or four laying hens and one who doesn’t lay but we’re happy for her to stay as a pet – she does eat weeds and slugs and she still produces fertiliser after all!

So, sometime in the next couple of week we’ll be doing the work and creating a fixed run that is 9 feet by almost 6 feet with a house that is about 5 feet square with plenty of space for the birds. After that we’ll be visiting a local hen breeder for some new birds.

I’ll keep you posted!

Some serious financial trimming is going on here but it’s only what I do every January. As a sole trader and a small business I am aware of every penny spent and received by Ethics Trading. I am aware of the full impact of every stock choice I make.

With big business where there are many people tinkering with all aspects of the business there isn’t the capacity for one person or very few people to get the full picture of what is happening and to react really quickly to solve problems which can then get so big and out of control that they sink the business. In a small business the control is there and we can react, change and be much more dynamic. As a result I firmly believe that we are the future.  Small business, online business with fewer overheads and costs, that is the way forwards. We are the ones who will not only survive this recession, we will thrive and grow against all the odds, but only if we get it right, only if we can react fast enough.

So far, January is one of the best months, in terms of sales, that Ethics Trading has had in about a year. It’s a fantastic start to 2009.

Thank you.

It was raining on Monday and the rain felt hard and cold. We were chilled, fed up and decided to just get the shopping out of the way in one trip – after getting sausages and a roasting chicken from our favourite butchers in town. (roasting chicken to differentiate from the laying chickens we have in the back garden)

So we went out to Tesco. Now a trip round Tesco is usually more expensive than a wander round the separate shops in town, or a trip round Lidl, so I try to buy as little as possible in there – but their milk and bread last longer than anyone else’s and they taste better so we do tend to get those in there…. Anyway, this week we ended up doing the bulk of the shopping in there.

But two things were a pleasant surprise, and one was only apparent when we made dinner last night.

First – when we were at the checkout there were NO plastic carriers to help yourself to. We take our own cloth bags anyway but this is new, there have always been piles of plastic carriers to just take if you wanted them. Now they’re behind the checkout and you have to actally ASK for them! The checkout person said “They’ll start charging for them next.” and she was a bit taken aback when I said that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

The second one was a result of a change in diet for us. My kids like fish fingers, I’ll eat them but I’d rather have a nice bit of fish. So I’ve been steadily trying out “big fish fingers” = battered, fillets of fish. We’ve had haddock from Lidl until now and that comes in a plastic bag and that is inside a cardboard box. We can recycle rthe box but not the bag. This week we got “6 Breaded White Fish Fillets” from Tesco and I was expecting the same. But no. I opened the box, expecting the plastic bag and there wasn’t one! Just a card box to recycle – after we finish the second three.

Nice one Tesco!

If you try to leave a comment and have any problems then please to let me know.

Big Potato!

“This giant weighs 11.3 kilos (24.9 pounds),” Khalil Semhat told the AFP news agency at his farm near Tyre, 85 kilometres (50 miles) south of Beirut.

“I’ve been working the land since I was a boy, and it’s the first time I’ve seen anything like it.”

Mr Semhat, 56, said he had to ask for help from a friend to get the huge vegetable out of the ground.

He insisted that he had used no fertilizer or other chemicals to produce it.

So, the world’s largest Organic potato …… Mind you, just south of Beirut? I wonder what the chemical load in the soil is anyway?