Many of the large companies are now joining up with the Carbon Trust to show how much carbon is used to provide products to the shop and how much energy used to cook, wash or prepare the food. The top half is the amount of greenhouse gases emitted during the products lifecycle displayed in grammes, kilogrammes or tonnes on a simple single footprint. Below this is the symbol CO2 (carbon dioxide) denoting the total amount of green house gas emissions including preparing and cooking.

Another site to look at is the carbon footprint pages with a great carbon calculator to show how much carbon is emitted during our travel, eating and lifestyles. www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx. One example is a carton of 100% pure squeezed orange juice where 91% of carbon emission value went on production and 1% on distribution leaving 8% for comsumption.

This is a great way of not only checking how much fat, salt and sugar there are in products but now a carbon value too.

Dear readers,

The copy below from a fellow blogger makes for cold reading. I thought it best to copy and past with his blog address and take the time to thank him, and you, for taking time to read my ramblings…still no pictures but I am working on that! You know me…steam, pen and paper whilst getting into the computer age.

Great to see a plug for the remarkable charity CoolEarth.org, but the rate of removal of the rainforest is enormously faster than you say. . .

It’s going at the rate of a football pitch a second.

In the five seconds it takes you to read this sentence, an area of rainforest the size of five football pitches has been burned or cut down – that’s 5000 square metres every second. Put another way, an area of tropical rainforest the size of Greater London (1500 km2) is lost from South America, Africa and Asia every three days. That’s equivalent to one small country – say Wales (20,000 km2) – every six weeks.

Even more reason to support CoolEarth.org.

Keep up the admirable blog, Green Ghost
Richard, http:theroughguidetowestafrica.blogspot.com