As soon as it hits 3am the clubs suddenly turf all the drunkards out and the first thing the drunkards think about is food (trust me, I’ve been there). Everybody hobbles/ shuffles/ staggers to their nearest takeaway and get as much food as they can afford with the remaining pennies that hasn’t been used for beer money.

The food is quickly demolished and the remaining wrappers… what happens to them? 

Well the responsible drunks manage to crawl over to the closest bin and throw the wrappers away properly.The even more responsible drunk saves the wrappers until they get home and then place them in the correctly labelled recycling bin… but lets face it, this is rather unlikely. Then there’s the careless drunk who eats half the food, decides it probably wasn’t the best idea to eat so fast after drinking so much and drunkenly discards the wrappers on the street.

This is no good for the environment, it takes alot of extra energy to destroy the packaging in the first place so dumping it on the street only triples this problem.  To find out how green your local take-aways containers are by taking a gander at the chow website.

Over the last few years studies have shown that the average spider in the UK has actually grown in size by around 2%, with most of these growth spurts taking place in the female side of the species.

Andrew Davies, aged 23, is a graduate of Birmingham University and studied spider growth for almost two years as part of his degree. He states:

“We haven’t managed to pinpoint the precise cause for the increasing size of the spiders but we have a good idea whats behind it. Due to Global warming the UK summertime is gradually increasing in temperature and length, giving the spiders longer to feed and breed.”

“Instead of having skeletons on the inside, spiders have them on the outside and these are called exoskeletons. They are made up of layers of cuticle, which the spider then sheds at various times within its life and is then replaced with larger, thinker and stronger exoskeletons.”

“But because of the longer and warmer summers the UK now has, just one of the side effects of global warming, the spiders are shedding there exoskeletons more frequently. Mostly noticeable in the female spiders is the fact that the new exoskeletons replacing the old ones are around 10% thicker then usual. As a result the larger females were able to produce a high number of offspring.”

We have yet to see how this faster, stronger and more numourus version of the average house spider is going to effect the UKs ecosystem, it certianly sounds like bad news for the average house fly.

However, since 2008 the company has started making various moves to help reduce the size of its colossal carbon footprint. Starting with its delivery trucks which make around 2,000 deliveries a week to pubs and bars across the UK.

They have started running their company delivery trucks on Bio Diesel which originates from the cooking oil previously used to cook food in the company pubs. An impressive 95 of these more environmentally friendly delivery vehicles have been successfully put on the road after joining forces with DHL Exel Supply Chain and Bio Diesel Energy Company Agent.

But it doesn’t stop there because Wetherspoons are currently installing a glass crusher at their main distribution depot in Daventry. Glass from all the company pubs and bars will be returned here and then crushed onsite and recycled as road aggregate.

Victoria Jayne Hollick, 22, is a Team leader at the Elizabeth of York Wetherspoons pub in Mosley, Birmingham. She stated “I think it’s brilliant that so much effort is being put into recycling! Only a quarter of the company’s pubs actually recycle glass and cardboard onsite so the glass crush is a great idea!”

The company has also taken up the ‘Tote-Box’ scheme, which entails food such as meat or vegetables to be directly placed into plastic containers. On delivery the full containers are exchanged for empty ones which are then taken away, cleaned and reused. This enables Wetherspoons to drastically cut back on the amount of plastic and cardboard packaging used on the food.

Check out http://http://www.birminghamrecycled.co.uk/for more news and information on keeping it clean and going green!

Recently my parents have just bought a new kitchen, yes I know you don’t want to hear about the new kitchen… Even though it is a very nice one and I’m glad they went with the blue tiles instead of the grey but bare with me because I’m building up to the main issue.

So… we hired a skip to throw the old kitchen into and put it on the driveway at the back of the house where we couldn’t see it. Every night from hiring the skip we were hearing strange sounds coming from outside in the early hours of the morning. The next day we couldn’t help but notice that things were defiantly missing from the pile of rubbish.

Now I know this sounds strange becuase it was only a load of crap in the skip but it really bothered me that some randomer was sneaking onto our property in the middle of the night, rummaging through our old stuff and taking some of it home with them!

It started to drive me mad so me, my sister and a few friends decided to do a stake out. We lay in wait in our garage (which is electric and opens quite fast, good for shock value). At 5am we heard a van pull up and two men started going through our skip. We quickly pressed the open button and the garage door raised up to reveal two bald blokes in yellow high-vis jackets loading the old kitchen sink into their van!

Turns out they were actually really friendly and didn’t give a damn if we knew they had relieved us of our sink or not. One of the baldy blokes stated “If it’s in a skip, it’s anyones for the taking”. This was a serious part time job to them, driving round purposly looking for skips and anything with scrap value in them. They explained that they could easily get £15 scrap metal money for my sink.

This shocked me becuase almost every household has had a skip at one point, intending to just dump all the crap that goes into it. But other people are able to make money from recycling this so called “crap”. This made me feel lazy for not making the effort to recycle so much of the rubbish that went into that skip in the first place.

You may not have realised it but internationally, the meat industry on a whole produces a chunky slice that is 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

This huge slab of pollution is partly down to the carbon dioxide emission caused by fertilization usd on the cattle’s feed crop and farm machinery to harvest it. Then there is the shipping of cattle feed to the cows and the shipping of cattle around the world as food for ourselves.

But it doesn’t stop there. A shocking 30 percent of the Methane gas in the atmosphere is caused by Bovine flatulence, but even worse is the fact cattle’s manure also contains the Ozone destroying Nitrous Oxide.

You may not have known this but Methane actually has a global warming effect 23 times that of the bog standard Carbon emission. But Nitrous Oxide is the big daddy of the pollution gasses by having a terrifying 296 times bigger effect on the atmosphere then Carbon, that’s gigantic!

But don’t start blaming the bovines… it’s partly our fault too. The increasing human population means the demand for beef as food is ever rising, so more and more cattle are bred to keep up with them. As a result the cows are creating their own hoof-print on global warming.

Find out whats more dangerous a cow or a wolf at Allianz.com!

The Russian government has finally taken action against seal baiting and have banned the hunting of baby harp seals.

According to The Guardian the Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin accused the seal hunting as a “bloody industry” and has issued an order protecting seal pups up to a year old.

But is this really enough? Seal hunting is the largest mass slaughter of marine mammals in the world. Russia’s harp seal population has decreased by a third in the last ten years to numbers of only around 200,000.

Seal hunting is also carried out in Sweden, Finland and also Canada. This is a shocking practice especially when you take in to account that every spring over 325,000 seals are killed in Canada alone. Facts about hunting can be found on the Seasheperd site.

Why are such large numbers of seals being slaughtered when seal meat is considered mostly inedible to humans? Synthetic fur has been so well produced that its appearance is almost identical to that of real seal skin, there is no excuse. 

On top of this the seal numbers have also been slowly dwindling, especially around Russia because of the shrinking Arctic ice in the White Sea region due to global warming.  

A petition can be found on the HSUS site, take some action and put your name down.

After a just a few lectures of online journalism and a damn sight more research into the environment, nature and wildlife, I started to realise that there’s a lot of it out there.

But after every lecture I would make the journey home through the centre of Birmingham, plonk myself down in front of the TV with a ticka masala ready meal from Tesco that really isn’t that nice but it’s the only thing that isn’t green and furry in the fridge… and I would wonder why I don’t seem to see much of this ‘nature’ thing people keep harking on about.

Website such as change4life are constantly warning us that type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer are illnesses on the rise and I can understand why. Most people are so wrapped up with their busy lives at work, university or school that they forget about their fitness and health. Children on average spend around 2 hours sat still at a computer or television and from my experience it’s most likely more.

Maybe the fact most people don’t bother recycling is because they don’t have the opportunity to actually experience nature? They live in a busy city that acts as a bubble and prevents them from witnessing all those green leafy things first hand, up close and personal.

Well my good people I decided to go for it! I got well and truly down and dirty with some wildlife and dragged some city dwelling friends along with me. There are plenty of places out there that blend fun activities with protecting nature and the environment. Such as Go Ape which has a huge assault course set high up in the trees with zip wires and rope bridges as only a few of it challenges.

My date with nature left me absolutely exhausted but was definitely a bigger adrenalin rush then the TV! So come on people get out there, help the environment and help yourselves!

By Kimberley Gammon

One day I was idly wasting my time on facebook, as I am a student and this is what we do, and through the newsfeed an article on a pink dolphin caught my attention.

The dolphin was photographed by a Charter boat captain, Erik Rue, 42, in Lake Calcasieu which is an inland saltwater estuary close to the Gulf of Mexico. The beautiful creature instantly grabs you’re attention with its bright pink, perfectly smooth and flawless skin. (Full story and photo’s can be found on the Telegraph website).

The baby bottlenose dolphin was instantly recognised as being an albino by its red eyes and pink body due to lack of pigment in the skin. This is the first known case of an albino dolphin and even though there were fears of sun damage because of its albinism the dolphin is perfectly healthy and doing well. This then led me into researching into dolphins and how we humans and our nasty pollution are affecting them.

According to WikiAnswers global warming is the major threat to the dolphin’s survival because as they migrate they search for warmer waters, the dolphin pods usually have one leader and they all follow him. However, because the waters are becoming warmer due to global warming their leader end up getting mislead and guides his pod more inland then they should swim. They then become trapped in bays and gulf and are basically lost and tragically this usually results in whole pods of dolphins drowning.

As the primary causes of global warming we need to protect our wildlife as best we can, after all it’s just as much their planet as it is ours…

The discovery of Pinkie the first ever know pink dolphin to exist is so amazing it has won first place on the ‘Weird and Wonderful Animals’.

Now I know I’m supposed to be engrossed in my article writing about trees and people cutting down trees and what the bad fumes from the machines the people are using to cut down the trees are doing to the environment but I’v decided to tell you about something different.

It occurred to me the other day, hang on… I’ll set the scene: It was a sunny day, birds were singing, there wasn’t a cloud in sight and I was walking to University listening to happy songs and smiling… and not one person smiled back! Not one!

Now I know its the recession and everything but come on people! It’s not all doom and gloom. Research shows that smiling releases your body’s natural ‘happy’ drug (serotonin) and also endorphins into your brain. It also makes you appear more confident, intelligent and more approachable to other people. It only takes 17 measly muscles to smile and 43 to frown, so turn that frown upside down and it will do you some good.

This goes out to the little old lady at the bus stop who glared at me for smiling at her.Although it was right outside of the One-Stop in Perry Bar so she did probably think I was going to mug her.

p.s did you know that there’s 18 different types of smiles? I’ve tried counting them in the mirror and only found 7 so far.