Keep me appdated

All the social media mentioned yesterday are of course available as apps on your smart-phone too. If you haven't got a smart-phone yet..... What are you waiting for? I promise you'll love it and you'll be wondering what took you so long....

There are some great apps for keeping up with your organic life-style. These are just a few;

Don't ever print papers again. Share your documents with friends,
family, colleagues and business-partners. On your phone or on your computer.





 



Vegetarian recepies to use on Meat Free Monday.
Good inspiration!





Photos - so many apps to choose from;

Hipstamatic, Camera+, Pixlromatic,

Disposable, Instagram. 

Add filters or flashes to create unique pictures.

Saves your pictures in one place

and no need to print them out.











Lists Swedish farms shops.

Easy way to find locally produced greens, meats and more.

 Complete with a map function and short information about each farm.





Norwegian app. Scan the barcode of a cosmetic product
and the app will tell you if that product contains

 ingredients that can mess with you hormones.

There's a list of common chemicals and products. Such a great idea!

Play a game about climate change,
read the latest green news or donate money.

I only found a Swedish version.
Gives information about Fairtrade products
and where to find them.
Read stories from farmers,
and find out what you can do to help.

Green Guide (in Swedish only unfortunately).
From The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation. 

Has tips about what to buy, how to recycle, how to travel

and a smart way to find an eco-friendly store close to you.

App from from Swedavia, the Swedish company in charge of all major
Swedish airports. It's a game where you help passengers to reach their flights.
It should be quick and with as little environmental impact as possibile.

Strawberries

In Sweden strawberries are the biggest sign that summer has finally arrived. Ask any Swede and he/she will tell you that there is absolutely no strawberries anywhere in the world as good as the Swedish ones. We eat them for breakfast, lunch and dessert and we put them in salads for dinner together with grilled meat. We eat them as snacks, as appetizers together with feta-cheese, or in smoothies. The best thing ever is to go to your local farmer and pick them yourself. You spend hours in the fields eating as many as you're picking and leave sunburnt with red fingertips and many, many liters of bright red berries. Those get in the freezer to enjoy wintertime or they are turned into jam or cordials.

Pesticides used when growing strawberries in Sweden are Betanal SC/Kemifam SC. The company that sells these products in Sweden (Bayer CropScience) writes on their own website that whatever is left of the pesticide after spraying the fields shall be kept away from children and animals and separated from food. I really don't see how that goes together since we serve those sprayed strawberries to our children later....

In a test carried out in 2009, 94% of the conventionally grown strawberries (Swedish and others) contained traces of pesticides. Several of the pesticides discovered are suspected to cause cancer.

The good news is that the industry is working to find solutions that allow less harmful farming, so I hope it will soon be easier to find organic ones. Strawberries grown organically will meet challenges like weed, fungus and different pests, so you need to grow tough species and to put in more work to keep your plants free. It's definitely worth doing so though since studies have shown that organic strawberries can actually prevent cancer. Makes the choice quite easy... You can read more about this at krav.se. 

According to a recent study made at Lunds University in Sweden, bees really like organic strawberries. They pollinated 45% of the strawberry-flowers on the organic farms and only 17% on the conventional farms. So you can basically turn one wrong into two rights and have bee-hives next to your strawberry-farm.

Power of consumption

Nobody can do it alone, but with the small steps and choices we make every day, we can all do our part. That's the most important thing I want to show with this blog. We can really do it together. All consumers of food, drink, clothes, fuel, skincare etc etc can put the pressure on our governments and all companies to work for a better and more sustainable future for all of us simply by choosing what we spend our money on.

-Buying organic milk/wine/juice/coffee instead of regular shows our farmers that we don't want to drink chemicals and hormones.
-Buying toys painted with non-toxic paint or made of non-toxic plastic shows our toy-stores that they need to produce and sell things that won't give off poison when our children put them in their mouth.
-Buying organic skincare will tell the producers that we don't want to rub chemicals on the biggest organ we have; our skin.
-Using public transportation whenever possible and buy cars with alternative fuel-sources will show the oil-industry that enough is enough.

If we keep asking at our local stores for those products and keep buying the things that are good for us those things will be produced in a larger scale. We can make the power of money work in our favour.

Yes we can!

Nespresso - or someting else?

I don't drink coffee, but when I see the Nespresso pods that look like candy I'm really tempted to start.

The pods are made of aluminium, and in Sweden they can be disposed of at the regular recycling center as metal. Sweden and Germany are currently the only countries where this is possible. Told you we take recycling seriously.... In countries where this is not possible Nespresso has developed their own system to recycle and reuse the capsules. Ask at your local Nespresso store. 

The coffee beans are unfortunately not organic which means that this is not a very healthy option. Nespresso has a very good website with information on how they work closely together with farmers to create long-term business and to work together for a more sustainable future. It's an admirable approach, and I hope they will move even further and start promoting organic farming. As I've written before there are a lot of chemicals used in producing coffee, and that's really harmful for the producers, the environment and the consumers. So if you're buying Nespresso make sure to ask for organic coffee to make them understand that we want it chemical-free.

Reuse the pods? Below are some fun and creative pictures.

Beautiful cups from Dottings

Small works of art by Aqui H Gato

Necklace from the "Throw away Gold" collection by Nolia Shakti.

Key pendants. Artist unknown.

Table "What Else" from Studio Verissimo

Origins Skincare

Origins is a fantastic skincare brand. Not only do they have a lot to choose from, they also care very much about our environment. Some of their products are certified organic ones, but all of them are produced with a lot of respect towards the environment and the people meant to use it. They are mixing science and nature together beautifully with their organic ingredients and natural essential oils. Plants from all over the world are being used and their labs research each and every ingredient and mix them toghether. Some of the ingredients used are white tea, ginger, mimosa, mint, basil and vitamin C.

None of the products contains phtalates, dyes, mineral oils, PABA (chemical sunscreen), parabens, synthetic fragrances or petrolatum and the end result is tested on volunteer human panels. 

In North America (and more countries to come) they have a program that encourages their consumers to bring their used cosmetic bottles and jars (Origins brand or any other brand) to their nerest Origins store to be recycled and reused to help reduce the landfill.

I recently bought a brightening serum that Origins produced together with Dr Andrew Weil. They have made a comlete range of skincare-products together with carefully selected ingredients. Knowing that Dr Weil is a fantastic botanist this is really something to try.

The Origins homepage is a treasure-chest where you can spend a long time trying to decide what to try next. You can read all about the products and their commitment to purity. It is also a great that you can place comments about their products and to read what everybody else thinks.

Well worth a visit and a trial. Unfortunately you can not shop on their homepage outside of the US or Canada. In Sweden you can find them at some of the bigger department stores, or go wild when you travel.

Most important to choose organic

Food is the main source of human exposure to environmental toxins. You can't find everything in an organic version (yet), but if you just change the below things towards organic ones, both you and the environment will benefit hugely from that. The largest amount of pesticides are used on;

Coffee
I've written about this before and it's easy to find organic coffee in most shops.

Bananas
40-50 tons of pesticides are used in every 10.000 square kilometers (around 4000 square miles) each year. One of the pesticides used is chloropyrifos. Chloropyrifos is a neurotoxin used in the plastic bags that surrounds the banana stem. Because of this, the people harvesting our bananas may suffer from loss of apetite, insomnia, concentration difficulties, higher risks of lungcancer and even be suicidal. Getting close to this chemical is especially dangerous to the nervous system of children up to the age of 6 and there has been studies made that suggests a link between exposure to this kind of pesticide (and other organophosphates) and ADHD. Scientists even take it as far as to compare to the exposure to lead which 40 years ago proved to be very harmful. In Sweden it's easy to find organic bananas. Almost every food store has them.

Grapes
Grapes is the most commonly grown fruit in the world (about 45 percent). Grapes are sensitive to pests, a lot of times they are sprayed with pesticides even before any breakouts have been noticed, and grapes shows traces of pesticides more often than any other food. There are also several different chemicals used and how those chemicals interact is still not known. Even though each chemical in itself may not be harmful in a very small dose, they may cause damage together. Don't forget that the pesticides used on grapes also affects raisins, wine and champagne. About 85 procent of all grapes are used in producing wine. Organic grapes can be hard to find in Sweden, but organic raisins and organic wines are easy.

Potatoes
In Sweden this is the crop where the most pesticides are being used, and among those the King Edward and Bintje are the most sprayed ones. A Swedish potato is on average sprayed with pesticides 7 (some as much as 13!) times before they're harvested. If all Swedes would choose only Swedish, organic potatoes we would stop 95 tons of chemicals each year from harming ourselves and our environment. The most common pesticides used are Shirlan and Ranman. They are highly toxic towards aquatic organisms and also harmful to pollinating insects like bees.

Dairy products
Organic dairy means that the cows are fed organic food only, and most of it has to be grown on the farmers own farm. The animals should be allowed to move freely and to eat grass outside for at least eight hours a day during the warm season. The calves are allowed to suckle and to stay with their mothers for a longer period. Antibiotics are not allowed as a precaution. Happy, healthy animals, less chemicals and less antibiotics in our food. Luckily it's very easy in Sweden to find organic dairy. Milk, cream, butter, cheese, yoghurt etc can all be found in organic versions at the local supermarket.

Read more at Naturskyddsforeningen

Underkastelsen - Submission

I've just finished watching Stefan Jarls film Submission (Underkastelsen in Swedish). It's a fantastic documentary that teaches us how much chemicals we are exposed to every day. With the help of professors from all over the world Stefan shows us how everything around us affects our bodies, our hormones, our fertility, our overall health. From technical gadgets, the medicines we use, the toys our kids play with, the air we breathe, the water we drink.... It's a frightening picture of our everyday life. I can really recommend this movie for everybody that has just the slightest interest in where our lifestyle is taking us...
You can read more (in Swedish and English) here.