Monday, August 07, 2006

Catford Honey!

I was v impressed when doing my shopping in Sheel pharmacy today to see they had Catford Honey, produced in a back garden in Catford. You can't get much more local or low food miles than that!

A Ladywell resident wrote to me recently asking us to do more to promote milk delivery. Not really a milk drinker myself, but if you are, find me a milkman might be, er right 'up your street'.

Am happy to do anything (within reason!) that will promote small local businesses and take money away from supermarkets, so while I'm at it, I'll also give plugs to:

Sheel Pharmacy (312-314 Lewisham Road - the largest range of fairtrade and organic products I've come across in Lewisham, better than any of the chain stores).

Local organic fruit and veg box schemes:
UK5 organics (based in Greenwich)
Capricorn Organics (based in Bexley)
Abel & Cole (much bigger company, London-wide distribution).
If you know of any other good ones I've missed, please let me know.
15 reasons to order a box scheme today
and lots of reasons to avoid supermarkets:
Tescopoly
Corporate Watch - What's wrong with supermarkets?
What supermarkets won't tell you (The Ecologist)

Was interested to read the other day that TESCO is going to be offering incentives for customers to reuse bags - a small step in the right direction, but even if they meet their targets they will only reduce the number of their bags thrown away every year to 3 BILLION! Hasn't Sainsbury's been doing that for years, with little impact? IKEA started charging 5p/bag a couple of months ago, which has had more impact. I think it needs a bit of stick as well as carrot to change shoppers' habits, such as a plastic bag tax similar to that in Ireland.

5 comments:

Derek Wall said...

good post, I may steal bits of it!

talking of which when will some one set up an eco wiki to heal our world?

nice to have the councillor stuff integrated with some green lifestyle community change stuff.

Anonymous said...

I dunno, but someone kindly updated the Ladywell section of wikipedia and put a link to my blog :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladywell

Anonymous said...

TESCO Ireland are happy to charge customers for plastic bags so I fail to see why they can't take corporate responsibility here in the UK too.

Anonymous said...

absolutely, although it was introduced by the government and TESCO went along with it, whereas the UK government is inexplicably shying away from introducing a similar tax here.

Anonymous said...

When my team on the London Assembly were doing research for my report 'Plastic not Fantastic' we were told by one of the supermarkets that they had been prepared for the tax and were not really against it. They were surprised when Brown bottled out.