hippyshopper

Cheap organic bags (and a whole lot more)

These here organic cotton shopping bags are going for £11 in Bishopston Trading's summer sale. They're just one of Bishoptston's dozens of products - clothes, homeware, kids stuff - made from organic cotton grown in north India and stitched together by a well-paid bunch of tailors in south India. UK West Country denizens can head down to one of the eco-tailer's five shops, or you can order via email from the company's website.

A salvo from salvage land

There's no point pretending that shopping at salvage yards is as easy as buying your stuff from IKEA. In my experience, you'll definitely need a car, probably need to drive somewhere obscure and have a 1 in 3 chance of talking to the owner about his dog. However, those who persevere will be rewarded with gems such as this £450 Victorian tile and pine fireplace on sale in Kent. It's one of hundreds  of eBay-like lots alongside a UK-wide directory of the nation's salvage yards and antique dealers on the fantastic Salvo! website. By buying salvage, you'll not only prevent your home from looking like an identikit IKEA showroom, you'll also be re-using material, saving manufacturing energy and trees from being chopped down. Which makes for a win-win-win-win scenario if my counting's correct.

Paint you could eat your dinner off

The summer DIY season is in full swing - loft extensions are underway, new extensions are going up and rooms are getting redecorated. Which brings me to paint. As anyone who's ever used litres of white spirit to clean a roller and brush will attest, most of the stuff is full of chemicals. Auro, on the other hand, is water-based, smells lovely and falls off tools with a bit of warm water. Whether you should eat your Penne Pomodori off your freshly-minted surface is up for debate - Auro's emulsion does, admittedly, contain a bit of titanium to make it hardy. Anyway. My point here is that I've used Auro all over my flat, it's a joy to work with and also has the big advantage of being micro-porous and letting walls breath (unlike most chemical-filled paints). Yes, the price is painfully steep compared to Dulux - 2.5 litres of coloured interior emulsion will set you back £20 - but it's easily worth it. Auro organics

Class cardboard chairs

Now you could try making these chairs yourself using boxes from the supermarket. Unless you're an origami master with a post-grad in furniture design, however, I'm willing to bet your cardboard chair won't support a 100kg person and look elegant enough to place in an art gallery. Handily, the Lithuanian etailer of gorgeous design, Ona, will sell you one of its Mutabor Natural seats for a risibly cheap £10 each. The chairs score eco points aplenty for being energy-cheap to make and brilliantly easy to recycle, plus Ona donates 3 per cent of its profits to the Lithuanian Fund For Nature. One word of warning: if you click over to Ona's site to check out the chairs, be prepared to spend 15 minutes looking at other attractive and affordable stuff.

Fully recycled lovely lampshades

And the award for Most Glamorous Recycled Product of the Month goes to... Use UK's lampshades! They're made from 100% recycled cardboard and are backed by the very Hippy Shopper manifesto that "even small changes in purchasing decisions help to alleviate the pressures on the planet's resources." Green credentials aside, they're also some of the best lampshade designs I've seen since Helen Rawlinson. If I had the money I'd buy the entire limited edition range. As it stands I'll have to content myself to splashing out on one of these £32+ shades. You can order online at Use UK.

Saturday Night Fever solar tiling

Meet the eco version of John Travolta's dance floor. Perfect for performing synchronised group dance moves, the SolarBrick is basically a tough plastic brick filled with an LED light, a photovoltaic solar cell and a capacitor, which functions like a rechargable battery. The net result is 12 hours of nightlight, provided the brick gets an hour's direct sun or 8 hours in the shade. They're designed for outdoor use, waterproof, fit to drive over and apparently good for ten years' use without maintenance. In the UK, the best place to buy one appears to be from Solar Wereld in Germany - they cost 195 Euros (about £130) each. Does anyone know of a UK stockist? [found via Treehugger]

Update: Actually, Solar Wereld isn't in Germany - it's in Holland. D'oh. Thanks to Jen, who lives in Holland, for letting me know.

The joy of jugs

A nice simple one for you this morning - a recycled glass Calla jug designed by Spanish chap Adolfo Dominguez. There's not much to say except that it's a mighty elegant-looking receptacle, plus it holds 2.5 litres of liquid and is dishwasher proof. It's nice to know that your old wine bottles are going somewhere useful, isn't it? £30 to you, available from a new eco etailer called By Nature.

World's most ingenious vase

Maybe it's because I'm as classy as a Celebrity Love Island refugee that I've previously used pint glasses and jam jars as impromptu vases. Or maybe it's because I'm a vase pioneer - a title I'll have as my epitaph, please - like the RCA's Tomek Rygalik. The clever graduate designer's latest wheeze is a 'vase lid' that converts any water-holding receptacle into a gorgeous, highly individual vase - an ingenious form of recycling that uses what you've already got lying around the house. You can't buy this from ye little shoppes yet, but I'll post some more details from Tomek shortly. Tomek Rygalik's website [currently down].

Recycled circuit board gifts

Products of the week: Cutout's range of stationery, coasters and mouse mats made from recycled circuit boards. The photo's of the £9 Wire Bound Notebook, but you can also buy a sellotape dispenser, ruler, key ring, business card holder, CD wallet and a whole host of other unique bits from Cutout's website. And that's not all. Oh no. Cutout even makes ranges of gifts out of juice cartons, recycled plastics, plastic bags and recycled paper. The clever buggers.

Dazzling recycled worktops

As the drilling, hammering and paint-stripping on my street reminds me, 'tis the season for DIY. If you're doing up the kitchen - an understandable favourite seeing as you usually get a good return on your outlay - take a look at Eight Inch's gorgeous recycled glass worktops, pictured. The material's called TTURA and is made from 85% recycled bottlebank glass. It's hard-as-nails (Class A-rated nails), stain-proof and each worktop is completely unique. Pricing varies depending on specifications such as size, types of glass and thickness.  Eight Inch.

Moulton's small-wheeler up for an award

Still prevaricating about whether to ditch the bus for an about-town bicycle? Here's an incentive to help you off the fence: Alex Moulton's classic NS Speed Stainless bike (pictured) is up for a design award for its featherlight weight, gorgeous looks and ability to motor along despite having tiny wheels. Regardless of whether it wins, the nomination by James "cyclone vac" Dyson adds a lot of credibility to this ideal city commuter. It's up against the iPod, Millennium Dome and Jasper Morrison in the New Designers' awards. You can vote here and find an Alex Moulton dealer here. [found via Treehugger]

Recycled fire bowl

Burning blocks of wood in a whopping great metal bowl probably isn't, on balance,  the greenest lifestyle choice you could make this summer. But if it's just gotta be a logs 'n' flames June, I'd advise taking a look at this. Designed by John T Unger - who also does a fine line in recycled steel chairs - it's apparently heavy as hell and made from 100% recycled steel. £225 to you, plus a fair few quid for shipping it in from the US. Great Bowl O' Fire.

Belting recycled bits & bobs

Praise be for ingenious designers. This cracking place mat and coaster aren't made from ridiculously expensive Japanese fabrics imported from the other side of the world - they're hand-crafted from recycled leather belts. It's just one of a whole range of accessories made by Ting, expert at recycling vintage belts and seatbelt fabrics into stuff you'd actually want to buy. As well as place mats, it makes new belts, bags, wallets and cushions. You can order a selection of it via Ting's website  or buy a whole lot in person from Liberty in London. [read in Project Magazine]

With this eco ring, I thee wed

I'm not planning on getting married anytime soon - have you seen the latest divorce figures? - but if I was I'd be looking at this 22 karat sapphire Quetico ring. It's made from recycled metal, produced to Fair Trade Federation standards and has a gem that was grown in a laboratory, so you can be smug in the knowledge that it didn't result in a minging quarry somewhere. It's also made entirely by hand and looks good. It's one of 28 pieces of jewellery from GreenKarat, which tries to use recycled materials and eco-minded refineries wherever possible. The company's US-based, but ships regularly to the UK, Australia, Canada and the Netherlands. Thanks to the weak dollar, this ring would cost about £650 if you live in the UK.

Wood without the trees

Looking for an alternative to IKEA's lightweight, light-coloured wood furniture? Check out The Goodwood Cellars. Its craftsmen scour demolition sites and salvage yards for reclaimed wood to make into fresh furniture - handily saving new trees from being hewn down in the process. In addition to tables and chairs like the ones pictured, you can get dressers, beds, desks, mirrors, clocks and - for a bit extra - bespoke designs. Most of the wood is pine and hardwoods such as elm, oak, ash and beech. If you live in Devon, you can pop in and see for yourself - the company's based on The Quay in Exeter. [found via Treehugger]

Awesome card shelves

I'm going to be moving house soon, so I've been casting my eye over indulgent energy-saving bits of furniture I can justify. Top of the list is this cardboard shelving system, which is made from sturdy cardboard and hooked together with velcro (you can screw a couple of the larger loops to the wall). It's designed by the Swedes at ReturDesign, comes in black, white or 'natural' and costs £140 for a pack of 5 loops. They're on sale in the UK via the Insight Eco Store.

Save water, world, money

As veteran eco warriors will attest, there are lots of ways to cut down on water wasted by flushing toilets. Some are elaborate (building a cess pit under your house), some are eccentric (the Aussie mantra of "if it's brown, flush it down; if it's yellow, let it mellow") and are some are simply cheap and cheerful. As the astute will have correctly anticipated, the Interflush falls into the last camp. The idea is basic but brilliant - it's basically a fit-it-yourself plastic mechanism that goes in your toilet's cistern and causes a flush to only last as long as you hold the handle down. Interflush reckons you'll use 47% less water. At £20 including P&P, I reckon it's cheap enough to try for yourself.

What to do with old paint tins

Regardless of whether you see summer weekends as prime DIY or prime drink-yourself-silly opportunities, the odds are you've got some half-used paint tins sitting under the kitchen sink/stairs. So here's what to do with them. Instead of chucking them in the bin or pretending you'll use them in 2015, give them to someone else via Community Re>Paint.  The site lists the details of scores of Re>Paint groups across the UK - from individuals and charities to local authorities - who'd like to use your paint. If you're feeling particularly industrious, you could even take it to the next level and setup your own group.

Rad recycled chair

Sure, there's something slightly 80s-ish about this Dot! chair, but I think it just about gets away with it. It has a talking point design, for starters, and it'll also earn you lots of green kudos - 50% of the steel is recycled. It's covered in enamel - this season's must-have finish, if the design mag barometers are anything to go by - which means you can plonk it indoors or out. You can buy more than a 100 different coloured versions from here. It costs $500 - about £250 - plus postage to the UK. [found via MetaEfficient]

A lovely bunch of cocopots

Small ones, large ones - some as big as your head. Yes, what's true for coconuts is true for products made from coconuts, such as these rather spiffing coir garden pots from Wiggly Wigglers. Coir's the leftover husk of a coconut, which gets washed, sun-dried, steam-treated and then bound together with biodegradable latex into pots, dishes and tubes. Unlike nasty plastic pots, these ones will biodegrade in around 9 months above ground, 3 below. Wiggly's coir also comes from a reputable source - a single grower in inland Sri Lanka (Thorayaya, backpacking fans). Sizes range from 80 to 202mm; prices from £2 to £24.

Go bananas (the green & ethical way)

This is one to file under 'not new, very simple, still brilliant', if you're the filing type. It's exactly what it looks like - a banana hanger to keep your bananas from prematurely ripening the rest of the fruit in your fruit bowl (which I recall from my GCSE biology is caused by the high quantity of Ethylene bananas produce). Anyhow. It's both green and ethical. Green because it's made from rubberwood, a type of tree that's used for latex throughout its living life and is - usually - only felled at the end of its life. Ethical because it's made by Thaicraft, a member of the International Fair Trade Association. You can buy one for £12 online from Traidcraft.

Sleep soundly

When I bought a bed from Warren Evans about 3 years back, it wasn't because of the company's eco-credentials - it just seemed to be the only place that didn't sell hundreds and hundreds of horrendous-looking divans. It turns out, however, that Warren himself is also a big greenie. The bed and furniture-maker only uses environmentally-friendly woods accredited by the FSC, buys materials from "socially responsible businesses" and pays his craftsmen properly. The fact that the beds are relatively affordable and handsome doesn't hurt either. I can personally vouch for 3 years' worth of good sleep from the £345 Shaker, pictured.

Vote with your globes

Forget rosettes and the usual election paraphenallia - this year's window poster is a solar garden globe that lights up in your party's colour at night. Anti-war protestors and Kilroy Silk lovers will be disappointed that there isn't a purple one or a green-red mix - for everyone else, however, there's a yellow, blue, red and green one. The globes have a built-in solar panel and light up with LEDs for around 12 hours each night. BritishEco's currently selling them for £20 and will donate £5 to the Countryside Restoration Trust when you buy one. 

Best eco stools ever?

Wow. These Riki Watanabe stools are design at its best - simple but functional and gorgeous to look at. The fact that they're hippy-friendly - each one's made from recycled carboard and doesn't require any glue to assemble - is just a very big bonus. They come flat-packed in one of four colours; importing a 13 inch high x 13 inch diameter one to the UK works out at about £60 from nova68. You could, of course, grab some boxes from the supermarket, paint them and save on the carbon miles. But they won't look like these, will they?

[found via Treehugger]

21st century candles

Here's one I had to feature simply because it looks superb, doesn't use much power and won't burn down any houses. Sadly, you can't buy Vessel's candela range of LED candle alternatives in the UK yet, but I'm going to badger a distributor to stock it because I desperately want one. They're all mains and rechargable battery-powered, and Vessel say they turn on "automatically during power failures" (there's a button for physically switching them off on a daily basis). The new aqua+terra ones pictured are inspired by (ahem) a bird's eye view of pools and rocks in the south-west US.
Update: it's been rightly pointed out to me that you can actually buy these from Vessel's European website. Thanks - I completely missed that. Update#2: and I was also wrong about the LED bit. Sorry! The candela are very low power but they actually use mini incandescent bulbs for illumination - not LEDs.

[Via Obvious Diversion]

Brilliant glowing brick

Here's a worthy homage to Edison and Damien Hirst if ever we saw one. Dubbed the Glow Brick, it's a £20 nightlight that charges up from the sun in the day to release 4 hours of ambient 'glow' - not reading light - in the evening. It works thanks to phosphor luminescent material, just like the glowing stuff you see in the sea on Greek/Spainish/Med summer holidays. Find out where to buy one over here.

[via ShinyShiny]

Hemingway's handsome eco bag

For the bag fashionistas amongst you, this eco shopping bag is probably old news. Most carrier bag alternatives possess as much design flair as a a Kenwood bread maker - montages of oranges, anyone? - but this TRAID one's got a rad quilt look going on. It's designed by ex Red or Dead lad Wayne Hemingway and made from 100% chemical-free natural jute. Buying one also nets you extra greenie points as you're helping the very cool TRAID, who recycle old clothes into hip new outfits. You can buy one for £6 online or from TRAID's (mostly London-based) shops.

Hip hippy-friendly bowls

Like Habitat, green stuff and bowls? If you've answered with at least one yes, I reckon you'll be smitten with these eco-friendly bowls and cups (pictured) designed by Tom Dixon. The eco part of the equation is that they're made from some sort of bamboo and plastic hybrid, which is apparently biodegradable, dishwasher-proof and good for at least 5 years - at which point you can chuck them in your compost bin. They also happen to look gorgeous, which - considering Dixon's being doing awesome stuff at Habitat for years - should come as no surprise. They're available in 'speckled chocolate' (read: brown) from the the rather cool Insight Ecostore.

In comes the sun

Since the sun recently reappeared in Britain - it had taken a hike somewhere back in November 2004 - we've been collecting as many solar gadgets as we can lay hands on. This one, the SunPipe, is pure genius. It's basically a dome that channels daylight down a massively reflective aluminium tube to light up a room. Now we know what you're thinking - that's what's called a window, right? Point is, the tube makes the natural light brighter (much like, say, the sea and snow). Apparently it even amplifies moonlight, so presumably you'll need a blind or shutter to block the light out at night. The standard £200(ish) version has a 9 inch dome and should be enough to light a 6 x 9ft room. Interesting alternative to LEDs and other energy-saving bulbs.

Chopping board with bite

Plastic chopping boards loaded with 'anti-bacterial' chemicals seem to be proliferating faster than Tory party bandwagon jumps, so we thank the good people Down Under for their natural alternative. This large 'Eco Chopping Board' is made from Australia Camphor Laurel - a type of wood that apparently has natural anti-bacterial properties and smells nice into the bargain. The large (450 x 350mm) version pictured here is going for £60 exclusively from Ecomania.

Corking stools

These eco-friendly cork stool/side-tables speak for themselves, but that's not going to stop us from gushing that they're gorgeous and deserve a place in your home. Designed by Jasper Morrison, Vitra's selling them for £220 as part of the Vitra Home range. As well as gaining you kudos from your Wallpaper-reading mates, buying one will almost certainly help out a Portugese cork stripper. Cork's about as sustainable as you can get - it grows back after being harvested, doesn't require any chemicals to maintain and is recyclable too.