We are excited to launch our seventh Housewarming Guide: Electricity, Appliances and Home Renewables.

Our first six Housewarming Guides focused on how to reduce heat loss and how best to heat your home to achieve the lowest carbon emissions and costs. This guide focuses on saving money and reducing carbon emissions from electricity use. Find out how you can:

• use electricity more efficiently in your electrical appliances; and
• generate electricity at home through renewable sources.

Fast Fashion is harming the planet

The fashion industry accounts for:

• 20% of industrial water pollution
• up to 35% of ocean micro plastics
• 4% of global fresh water use
• 4-8% of global carbon emissions

Three out of five items of clothing end up in incinerators or landfills within a year of being produced. Every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned.

We can all buy less, repair more and buy second-hand. And we can call for change across the fashion industry.

Write to your favourite Oxford shops to demand better

As part of Great Big Green Week, Low Carbon Oxford North have compiled a directory of Oxford shops that score poorly on sustainability and ethical ratings (based on rating website Good On You), together with contact details and a template email and social media message.

Many of you will remember our Sustainable Fashion webinar last summer, with Kim Polgreen (Sustainability Educator) and Stephen Cawley (former Head of Sustainability at John Lewis). 

We’re launching an information campaign on Sustainable Fashion

There was so much interest in both the live event and subsequent video that we’ve decided to launch an information campaign: we want to continue our discussion of the environmental impacts of the clothing sector – and what we can do about it.

Did you know?

• Just 13% of the UK’s total land area has tree cover (compared to an EU average of 35%).
• Doubling UK woodland cover could help absorb 10% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions annually.
• Not only do trees absorb carbon, they fight flooding, reduce pollution, nurture wildlife and make landscapes more resilient.
• In a year, a single mature tree can absorb up to about 22kg CO2. That’s roughly equivalent to driving 10 miles in heavy traffic.
• 100 mature trees can absorb roughly a third of an average annual UK carbon footprint (excluding stuff we buy and international flights).

Every tree counts, and we need more trees in cities like Oxford. If two thirds of all households in Oxford planted just one tree in their garden, we would have an additional 40,000 trees, which in time could grow into the equivalent of a tenth of Wytham Woods!

This short video from the RHS talks you through what you need to consider if you want to plant a tree.