Seaweed Success

A Whitley Bay business selling products made from seaweed is expanding across the UK as people embrace a more plant-based diet. Seaweed & Co., founded by marine biologist Dr Craig Rose, sells a range of culinary oils infused with seaweed and seaweed nutritional supplements in Holland and Barrett and Sainsbury’s stores nationwide. Craig, 40, who founded Seaweed & Co. thanks to a £25,000 Virgin StartUp Loan, supplied food and nutrition manufacturers with a range of seaweed products before launching his own consumer-facing brand, Doctor Seaweed’s Weed and Wonderful, last year.
Seaweed & Co

Fuels Off The Pages

The Guardian has become the first major global news organisation to institute an outright ban on taking money from companies that extract fossil fuels. In a bid to reduce their carbon footprint, confront greenwashing and increase their focus on the climate crisis, the Guardian this week announced it will no longer run ads from fossil fuel extractors alongside any of its content in print or online. The move will come into immediate effect, and follows the announcement in October last year that they intend to reduce our net emissions to zero by 2030.

Fuel Ban

Fruity Lips

We all know we need to throw away less – the UK currently produces 10.2 million tonnes of food waste annually. So one company is taking surplus fruit and turning it into something else. FRUU makes lip balms and colour balms that are made from surplus fruit. The balms come in flavours including avocado, coconut, watermelon, mango, cherry, strawberry, pineapple, pomegranate, lime and lemon and cost £3 each. They are infused with Aloe Vera, which is calming and hydrating, have no artificial colourants and contain vitamin E. FRUU takes fruit that is going off or can’t be sold because it is wonky, or use by-products from the processing of fruit and turn it into the products. Each lip balm is made from up to 60% fruit-based ingredients, so that’s a lot of food being saved from going to landfill. The brand explains: ‘Our products are largely made of ingredients extracted and derived from more than 15 different types of nutrient bursting fruits. ‘Most of the ingredients are produced as a by-product of processed fruit waste, which generates vital extra revenue for small fruit farmers.

Fruu

Morrisons Axe Jobs

Morrisons is axing 3,000 management roles as part of a huge restructuring to create more shop floor jobs. The firm says it is also creating 7,000 new hourly-paid roles at its 500 stores, meaning a net 4,000 new posts. The new jobs will be in customer-facing roles, such as more butchers, bakers, fishmongers, the supermarket said. Morrisons said the new roles will be a mixture of part and full time posts, but declined to reveal how the numbers will be split. The company says those in managerial jobs who want to remain working at Morrisons can stay. However, their new offer will be at the shop floor level. Front-line store staff at Morrisons earn £9 an hour. The big four supermarkets are all making changes to try to stem the flow of shoppers switching allegiance to discount stores. They are all hoping to save money on staffing costs in order to be able to offer bigger discounts to shoppers in store. Within the past year Tesco, Sainsbury's and Asda have all announced significant job cuts at management level.

Morrisons Job Shuffle

Pointless Plastic

Tesco is removing plastic wrapping from its multipack tins in an effort to cut down on waste. The supermarket giant says it will remove 350 tonnes of plastic a year from the environment. Britain's biggest supermarket is working with the likes of Heinz and Green Giant to replace plastic-wrapped multipacks with multi-buy deals. Tesco said the move was the first of its kind by a major UK retailer. And environmental group Greenpeace welcomed the decision to get rid of what it called "pointless plastic". More than 40% of Tesco customers buy tinned multipacks, with 183,000 sold across its stores every day. Multipacks of baked beans, tuna, tinned tomatoes and soup are among the most frequently-bought grocery items in the UK, it said. Tesco is not the only supermarket to look into scrapping plastic wrap around tinned goods.

Pointless Plastic

Vegan Toothpaste

Colgate has launched a new toothpaste which is being billed as the first of a kind because it comes in a recyclable tube. Toothpaste tubes have traditionally been impossible to recycle because they are made from a mixture of plastic and aluminium. Consumers get through 20bn packs of toothpaste every year with discarded tubes contributing to the plastic pollution crisis. But Colgate’s new Smile for Good brand, which has also been certified by the Vegan Society, comes in a tube made from high density polyethylene (HDPE) which is the same plastic as milk containers. Colgate said its engineers had figured out a way to turn the hard plastic, which is widely recyclable, into a “comfortably squeezable” tube. However, the green toothpaste, which is on sale in Waitrose and Boots, comes at a high price. At £5 for 75ml, Smile for Goods costs more than six times as much as a regular tube of Colgate. Colgate has also taken the unusual step of listing the toothpaste’s ingredients on the tube alongside a simple explanation of their function. Consumers trying to buy greener products were confused by the role of the various ingredients, the company said. While the role of fluoride is probably well understood, the tube explains that silica cleans and polishes while glycerin prevents the paste from drying out.

Vegan Toothpaste

Rutland Falls To Golden Arches

Rutland will soon lose its claim of being the only English county without a McDonald's after councillors voted in favour of allowing the fast food chain to build a drive-thru on the outskirts of Oakham. More than 50 people wrote to the county council objecting to the plans, with one woman saying it was because of "who [McDonald's] are and what they stand for". But no-one on the authority's planning committee voted against the proposals, with eight in favour and one abstaining. Many fear the arrival of a big-name, fast-food restaurant will forever change the character of the nation's smallest county - famous for its hunting scene, tourist-attraction reservoir, and independent schools. "It's disgusting - Oakham is not the place for it," says Sandra Wells, 57, who has lived in Rutland all her life. "I don't like fast food and there are too many McDonald's [elsewhere]." But those in the town who do enjoy a Big Mac are happy at the prospect of not having to travel to a different county every time they want a fix.Oakham's mayor David Romney supports McDonald's plans - it is suggested the restaurant could create 65 jobs - and believes it will lift the town out of the "Dark Ages".

McDonalds Everywhere