Whilst we all know decreasing our car usage is an effective if not always easy step in reducing our carbon footprint. As Australian suburbs gradually become more dense, renters in inner city suburbs may also increasingly find that they have a decreasing amount of space to park and store cars.

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Screw Light bulbs
Donna Green and Liz Minchin
ISBN 9781742580685
AUD$32.95

Attempting to navigate through the myriad of facts and figures pertaining to what is causing and what can be done about climate change is a business fraught with confusion, pitfalls and frustration.

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Apologies for that headline there, it was cheesy and mildly offensive (to some), but I wanted to grab your attention and tell you about a bunch of great and really interesting links I came across yesterday.

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We’re too late for their recent information session, but Melbourne Carrotmob have been busy on the streets of Boroondara encouraging small businesses to ‘go green’ by promising a plethora of customers if the businesses plough the profits back into environmentally friendly measures…

A carrot instead of a stick as it were…

melbourne.carrotmob.org

After all, businesses are generally renters to!

The past few weeks have been very interesting for Green Renters with a trip to Sydney and a presentation at the Sustainable Living Festival, so what’s next? (more…)

We all know bikes are great, but for a lot of us we have very little space to actually store the two-wheeled-wonders, there are a growing number of small and foldable bikes now which are ideally suited to inner city life and I came across this great round up from Green Tenant…

greentenant.blogspot.com/2009/12/folding-bike-for-urban-apartment.html

Here in Melbourne we’re infamous for our love of Coffee and we drink a hell of a lot of it…

A fair few consumers have been increasingly aware that all those paper cups the coffee comes in are not particularly good for the environment and must end up somewhere when we’re done with them. Bio-degradable cups, the old school metal coffee cups and people with mugs have been slowly growing in numbers around town as people bring coffee from home or take them to cafes. The problem with a lot of existing ‘drink recepticles’ is that they are often non-standard sizes and staff don’t know what to charge people, often charging more and thus putting off the enthusiastic environmentalist…

Enter the Keep Cup… (www.keepcup.com.au)
It’s reasonably priced, stylish, comes in several colours and most crucially, comes in a variety of standard cafe sizes.

We got our hands on two to test for Green Renters and my first comment would be on the Keep Cup’s excellent design. They feel like a normal coffee cup, the lid has an excellent movable plug to cover the drinking hole to keep your coffee warm when you’re not drinking it and the coloured band you see is for writing your name or favourite coffee type on.

After experiences taking my own mug to cafes and being greeted with confused staff and a wide range of charges, I was most intrigued to see how the Keep Cup was treated in Cafes.

Generally it was much the same experiences as taking a mug or metal cup, prices varied widely, reactions varied from surprise, to confusion, to delight and perhaps the only fundamental difference with taking the Keep Cup was their burgeoning fashionability, which gained you extra cudos points with a lot of staff.

Overall, the Keep Cup is a great product and it’s accompanying website equally as stylish and paractical with a cabon emmissions savings calcuator and a whole host of information for businesses and consumers.

Inspired by a colleague at work who also took my Keep Cup for a few test runs (he ended up buying his own, so he must have liked it) we have decided to put together a Google Map of people’s experiences with the Keep Cup, ‘how were you treated’, ‘how much were you charged’ etc… I guess it could be used for all BYO cups, but we shall leave that up to you out there…

View Keep Cup in a larger map