There are people in life who just have that ‘get up and go’ spirit and Rob Curtis is one of them. The Welsh Councillor has been a life long environmental campaigner and his achievements are plentiful. The man behind the introduction of a green recycling waste service has rightfully been honoured for his hard work and tireless eco campaigning, with the prestigious Green Champion award. The award is part of South Wales Echo’s Community Champion Awards, which were run in association with the supermarket, Morrisons.

The man himself is praised in a recent edition of Wales Online, where details of his award were announced. Curtis himself knows all about eco issues and eco related promotional products and environmentally friendly promotional merchandise. He has successfully lead campaigns to get the council to use free range chickens in their catering service and also set up recycling schemes for batteries and aluminium foil. Indeed, his passion even took him from his own home soil to the jungles of Africa, in a bid to save silverback gorillas!

Councils throughout the UK are of course becoming increasingly green! With carbon emission targets and European recycling targets to be hit, local boroughs find themselves looking for new and smarter ways to be more environmentally aware.

One of the simplest ways a council, or indeed any business or school, can become more environmentally friendly, is to switch their regular source of promotional products to eco promotional merchandise. Making this simple, but effective change doubles green credentials in a heartbeat!

Choosing sustainably sourced promotional merchandise, such as Eco Friendly Sustainable Wood Pencils with erasers, or promotional products made from recycled materials, like the Eco Friendly 15cm Flexi Rulers, made from recycled UK waste polypropylene, can help companies to achieve their targets and goals with ease.

Imagine a house that was so energy efficient that it not only had no electricity bills, but it actually made you nearly seven hundred pounds from unused energy since February? Sound like a pipe dream? Amazingly, not. This is how a ’super home’ functions and with the help of Government loans, retrofitting your home could help you make environmental and financial savings.

New Government ‘Green Deals’ are emerging, which could see householders get up to ten thousand pounds worth of money in green loans, to put towards making their homes more environmentally friendly and energy efficient to run. The ‘Pay as you Save’ loans are designed so that the cost of fitting energy saving devices, such as solar panels, will be outweighed by savings the home-owner makes. There are currently fifty ’super homes’ in the UK and the Sustainable Energy Academy (SEA) and the National Energy Foundation are hoping to showcase many of these to encourage people to follow suit.

The homes generate cash by ‘feeding-in’ energy to the National Grid and earning money back from energy put in to the system. With energy saving fittings in place, such as underfloor heating, loft and cavity wall insulation and solar panels, these homes are super efficient when it comes to trapping and producing energy.

As the UK has predominantly ‘old housing stock’, the retrofitting of homes is a necessary solution to the carbon dilemma. More information regarding the ‘green deals’ will be available soon, with literature and promotional merchandise available for those who are considering the option.

For those companies, local councils and schools which are currently planning environmentally friendly energy saving campaigns, there are many eco friendly promotional products and items of promotional merchandise available. Green and eco promotional products can help to bolster campaigns, while remaining environmentally friendly in the process.

Prime Minister David Cameron has unveiled plans to improve communities from the bottom up, by enacting a ‘Big Society plan’. The plan is designed to help local communities to get ideas up and running that will improve their areas. Speaking from Liverpool, the PM spoke of the four areas which have been chosen to help kick off his ‘people power’ movement.

 The locations that have been chosen are Sutton and Cheam (London), Windsor and Maidenhead (Berkshire), Eden Valley (Cumbria) and Liverpool City. Each area was chosen following petitions submitted asking to form projects in these areas.

Civil Servants will be on hand to help distribute funding – which is coming via the Government from dormant bank accounts – and will also help in handling legislation, promotional products, cutting through red tape and arranging promotional merchandise, where necessary.

One example of these projects is in Berkshire, where money will be used to improve local recycling rates by offering cash incentives to residents.

It is hoped that, given the ‘green’ ethos behind these projects, any promotional projects or promotional merchandise produced for these campaigns will be made from recycled or sustainable materials.

England has won the not so prestigious title of ‘Dirtiest Country in the World Cup Tournament’. Pitted against all the other football tournament contenders, a Keep Britain Tidy poll has seen England come out on top – unfortunately this is one contest the UK did not want to win!

Over half of those people questioned said that this was the ‘most littered’ country in the world. Thankfully, however, the home football squad fared rather better. The title of dirtiest player (as in ducking and diving, rather than hygienically challenged) was given to the Ivory Coast player, Didier Drogba – who also plays for Chelsea. He was closely followed by Real Madrid’s Portuguese player, Cristiano Ronaldo.

The figures behind the facts show that England walked away winners of the poll for a very good reason. In fact seven hundred and eighty million very good reasons. Which is how much money it costs to clean litter off the streets in this country every year.

Whilst the Government continues to try to spread the ‘Keep Britain tidy’ message through the use of adverts, promotional products, marketing strategies, fines and promotional material, it seems that more needs to be done.

Everyone needs to develop a sense of pride in keeping the country tidy – and may perhaps require rather more stringent ‘reminders’ to do so. There are many promotional products which can be used effectively and serve as visual reminders to people to do just that.

Items of promotional merchandise, such as Wheelie Bin Pencil Sharpeners and promotional products, such as Wheelie Bin Pen Pots, have proven effective in encouraging people to recycle.

As such, similar promotional merchandise can be used to encourage the public to clean up after themselves.

From next year, shoppers in Wales will be sure to make an extra effort to remember to bring their reusable shopping bags with them – otherwise they will find themselves shelling out seven pence per carrier bag at the till!

In a bid to cut up to eighty per cent of plastic bags habitually handed out at the point of sale, customers will have to pay for the privilege of a plastic bag. Profits from the carrier bags sales will be shared between the supermarkets and various environmental agencies and charities.

Whilst many companies now produce their own promotional product style reusable shopping bags, there are still an estimated ten billion bags given out by stores each year. Recent campaigns have seen the number of single use carrier bags decline, with many shoppers instead opting for promotional merchandise forms of reusable shopping bags, but it seems that this is not enough.

The Welsh scheme, which is similar to the Republic of Ireland, has the full backing of the Welsh Assembly and the Houses of Parliament – English shops are soon expected to follow suit. Shoppers in Marks and Spencer’s, Aldi and Lidl will already be familiar with using and purchasing, the stores’ reusable promotional products bags and it looks as though all shoppers will soon have to be onboard.

Of course this move will be excellent for the environment. In China, when shoppers were asked to pay for carrier bags or use promotional merchandise bags instead, the country saved a reported three million tonnes of oil in production costs in the first year alone.

Companies and even local borough councils can also take advantage of this move by producing their own promotional products and promotional merchandise, offering reusable carrier bags for shoppers, choosing from various eco friendly designs that are both stylish and practical.

It has been estimated that the 2010 World cup in South Africa will have a Carbon Footprint of 2.8 million tonnes. To put that in terms that we can all understand, this is roughly the same as six thousand space shuttle fights or if every person in the UK had twenty cheeseburgers apiece.

The Carbon Footprint is partially clocked up by the one million spectators who are likely to travel to the event and also by the ninety million viewers at home (especially those watching on energy hungry plasma TV’s). However, as frightening as these figures provided by the Irish Times may be, companies that are conducting promotional products and promotional merchandise-based marketing campaigns to tie in with the sporting event have the option to do so in a rather more eco friendly way.

Finding the right eco friendly promotional products for your campaign is easy. Choose eco friendly promotional merchandise such as Recycled Mugs, Eco Friendly Keyrings or Recycled Paper pens and you can rest assured that you are not damaging the planet in your bid to support your national team and capitalise on their footballing journey.