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Waste not want not - in these times of green awareness and financial concern, it’s more important than ever that we don’t waste precious resources. Yet in the USA, the average American dumps about 14% of the food they purchase every year. In the UK, a typical family throws away £50 worth of food – every month! If this sounds familiar, here are a few simple steps you can take to reduce, and hopefully eliminate, food waste in your household.

1. After steaming (or boiling) your veggies, keep the water, let it cool and then use it to water plants. The added nutrients from the vegetables are natural plant fertilizers – and water is a precious resource too!  When rinsing fruit and veg also consider collecting this water as it might be usable in the garden as well.

2. Too many tomatoes? You can dry them in the oven, which also concentrates the flavour and makes them sweet and delicious. Just cut them in half or dice them and put them in the oven at about 150 degrees for 2-3 hours until all the moisture is gone. Ideally, you can combine this oven use with other cooking so that you’re also saving on fuel costs. Then jar them up and use any excuse to eat them! You can watch a video demo (with thanks to greenopolis.com)

3. Did you know you can freeze eggs? Just take them from their shells and use an ice tray to separate them. You can see more here.

4. Morning-after baked potatoes can be delicious, too – heat a little warm milk and butter, then slice the potatoes lengthwise and scoop out most of the inside and add it to the milk. Add sour cream, parmesan cheese, garlic salt or anything else that takes your fancy, mash or beat the mixture to whip them up, spoon the mix back into the skins, then put in a greased baking dish, maybe sprinkle a little grated cheese over them, or chives or bacon bits, then bake.

5. Pre-cycle: don’t take packaging into your home. In many places in Europe, overpackaging can be left at the store, which makes a lot of manufacturers rethink the way they package things. Precycling beats recycling hands down. Look at glass bottles, which go from green bins to recycling facilities where they get crushed and ground down and remade into bottles. Why not go back to having a deposit on bottles, so that they’re returned to the bottling plants to be cleaned and then refilled. Surely bottles should only be remelted into glass when they’re broken?

6. A great site for eco-foodies is Love Food Hate Waste. Every year in the UK £12 billion worth of good food is thrown away: Love Food Hate Waste is a campaign from WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) and has lots of tasty recipes and top tips to help us all make the most of the food we buy.

7. Finally, any organic matter whatsoever (even dog poo!) can be transformed into lovely plant-loving mulch through the magical process of composting. There are many places to learn about this ancient art, here’s just one.

Imagine that at the end of this century, when your human grandchildren have been born, planet earth will be a scorched dust-bowl and humans will only survive on the fringes of the Antarctic. Do you think that’s a possibility? Hard to imagine? Well humans, I’m sorry to say but this is indeed what will happen if radical changes aren’t made in global carbon emissions over the next few years. Some humans even think it’s too late, but, like a lot of dogs I’m keeping optimistic that people will wake up and smell the coffee.

What’s a dog to do?

Well, yesterday, in spite of the rain, I took myself off, with my humans, to the new Cultivate/Eco-Unesco building, The Greenhouse, in St. Andrew Street (where Enfo used to be, opening to the public on 2nd December) for a lunchtime seminar on Carbon Tax. The humans were very interested. I was mildly interested at first and just wanted somewhere to curl up and dry out from having walked into town in torrential rain. But… I couldn’t believe my dog-ears! I had no idea how serious the situation really is. The picture for the future of planet earth, home to us all, is bleak - the rain forests torched, the polar ice caps melted, heat and dust everywhere.

…and it’s not the dogs doing it!

Look at the past few weeks in this country… has the torrential, bucketing-down rain put a smile on your face each day? I wouldn’t think so. Look at the top left photo - that’s me and the position I’ve been in for the past few weeks. There was nothing else for it but to take to the bed and stay dry. Now, take a look at my photo below before things started to get really bad. That’s me carpooling with my human wearing my happy, smiley dog-face.

What kind of world do we want to live in because from where I’m standing it’s looking like we’d better get used to the fact that endless rain might not be a passing weather phase but a permanent fixture in this country.

Our climate is changing forever, unless you do something and do it now. I’m saying this as your Best Friend and I’m hoping that we dogs won’t have to re-evaluate this age-old relationship…!

TripMia, back in the saddle! It’s been an age since I’ve dog-blogged. The humans just seemed to take over but here I am again about to bang on about Obama and how “green” is “green”… but first of all check out the photo… does it look like me with a bad perm? Well, it’s not. It’s someone who looks very like me. Her name is Early (?!) and she’s American. My humans, Liz and Breda, met her in Connecticut at Tobey Pond where Early likes to pond-surf. It’s not exactly riveting stunt-stuff, unlike my car-surfing, but then again I’m gracious enough to know that not all dogs are like me - brave.

Firstly, I’ll tell you how my humans got to befriend Early and how my doggy-nose was out of joint as a result. Liz and Breda headed to America leaving me behind with our neighbours, who I love, but being left is just that, being left. I’m very green myself and didn’t want to be adding any air-miles to my karmic debt BUT I now figure, if the plane is going anyway, the plane is going, right? So me on the plane with my humans isn’t going to make any difference. I’m not even taking up a seat! So, firstly I had to deal with that, then I had to cope with being replaced by Early who they loved spending time with (she’s working on her surfing skills but, between ourselves, I just can’t see her on the waves in Lahinch, can you?) I will admit that Early is cute, just like me, and so once I got over my initial dog-envy, she and I became e-mail buddies.

Early and I chat regularly about the things that interest us; car-surfing, pond-surfing and car-pooling for humans. Like me, Early is proud to say that she never travels alone in a car. We also discuss the state of the world and what we can do about it, as mere dogs, and two things we can’t fathom about America is this: why don’t the USA have a plastic bag tax and why don’t Americans hang their clothes out to dry?! What is it in their culture that makes them act like hanging clean clothes out to dry in the fresh air is equivalent to hanging out your dirty laundry in public? Why do Americans take huge loads of washing, soaking wet, from enormous washing machines and put them in super-duper dryers? Can you imagine the carbon emissions that would be cut down if all American households were encouraged to dry their washing naturally, finishing them off in the dryer if they need to? And why would a country that size and that developed not have a plastic bag tax to encourage people to recycle their plastic bags, or just use their own shopping bags? My own humans couldn’t locate somewhere in the area that they were in that would take dry-cell batteries for recycling and had to take them home to Ireland. Couldn’t Obama listen to the dogs and start with those little things instead of just making promises to the world about America lowering carbon emissions?

Through my doggy web-network I just know in my bones that I will somehow get to connect with Bo Obama (black and white Portuguese Water Dog) in the White House to see if he can have a word in Mr. President’s ear. It’s all very well to be drinking beers on the lawn and all of that (Early filled me in on that scenario!) but sometimes something just needs to happen!

Obama, all I can say is “Yes you can-ine!”