GUILT FREE CITY LIVING

You don't have to move to the country or start a worm farm to make your urban life a little bit greener. Here are small ways to feel a little less guilty and a little more eco- conscious while living in town.

BE INSPIRED:
The Canadian Centre of Architecture has a brilliant travelling exhibition right now called What You Can Do With the City it proposes 99 clever ways to revamp urban living and make positive change on your home turf. Log on http://cca-actions.org and check out the action toolkit.

GET GROWING:
indoor herbs, it'll save on waste, plastic packets and money. The hardier varieties are mint, chives, sorrel, marjoram or fennel, but with some TLC you should be able to grow whatever you like to eat! For pretty containers check out www.urbangarden.com, pick a pot with drainage holes and then put a thin 3 to 4 cm layer of gravel or terracotta crocks at the bottom. Half fill with a soil-based compost, add a sprinkling of slow release fertilisers like Growmore and mix them together with your hands. Tease your herbs out of their plastic pots and arrange them prettily in their new home, fill containers in with enough compost to cover the roots by about 1 cm and leave a 2-3 cm lip from the top. Now just add water. If you want instant gratification order organic herbs in a bag from Jamie Oliver's website http://www.jamieoliver.com/jme/herbs-and-plants.html

GUERILLA GARDEN:
Don't have your own patch of land? Never mind, you can beautify the city around you. Guerilla gardening is by far the nicest subversive movement out there the only thing you have to do is find a neglected corner of your neighbourhood and get digging, or seed sprinkling. For ideas or to find a local group go to www.guerrillagardening.org

SHOP:
Buy seasonally. Find a neighbourhood farmer's market, www.farmersmarkets.net, if it's local you can pretty much guarantee it's seasonal. Seasonal means the food hasn't travelled thousands of polluting miles to get to you, and is still packed with nutrients. TV chef Valentine Warner is passionate about eating seasonally, his cookbooks 'What to Eat Now' are full of ideas. There's also a handy website www.eattheseasons.co.uk that gives you a list of what's in season divided by category; vegetables, fruit, fish and meat.

INDULGE:
Use natural, organic, skincare. You're not only being good to the environment but to yourself. Each day the average woman uses a dozen products containing about 160 chemicals and that's all before having a cup of coffee. Less is definitely more in beauty and Purity Organic uses hard-working, efficacious, sustainably-grown ingredients in a simple, affordable regime that will have you looking beautiful without wasting time or money. Give skin a spring clean with Facial Exfoliator, a deep pore cleanser that uses rounded, ground coconut shell to exfoliate within a blend of softening, moisturising coconut oil, sweet almond oil, glycerine and aloe vera.

CHANGE:
Tiny adjustments in your daily life can end up having a big impact on your bank balance and the planet. The first thing to do is eradicate all those little glowing red buttons and LCD displays at home, standby mode wastes the equivalent of around two power stations' worth of electricity each year in the UK. Visit the Energy Savings Trust website for ideas www.energysavingstrust.org on how to make your home more efficient. But don't feel you have to change everything at once, start small: use a travel mug for your latte habit and a glass bottle for water, it saves on hundreds of paper cups a year and could keep you and your family safer from the chemicals in plastic that are leaching into water. Keep lids on pans when you're cooking, it saves energy. Do laundry at 40 degrees and sign up with a green energy supplier. For more ideas practical, earth saving and wallet-friendly insights, go to www.shiftyourhabit.com created by Elizabeth Rogers, who wrote The Green Book

Don't forget to sign-up for our nationwide search for two brand ambassadors with beauty and brains to help spread the message of organic skincare - for full details visit http://www.purityorganicskincare.com/brand-ambassadors.html

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