Recycling

Most of what you need to know about recycling household waste in Oxford can be found on Oxford City Council's Recycling Page. Oxford is a fairly 'green' city, so most areas have some kind of home collection provision for glass, tins, paper and, more recently, card, plastics and garden waste. To find out what can be collected from your door in which containers, look HERE; to find out your collection days, look HERE; to locate nearby 'bring (deposit) banks' for anything else, have a look HERE. If in doubt, your best bet is to take more or less anything (from furniture to oil and batteries) to Redbridge recycling centre at the bottom of the Abingdon Road (01865 721464). If this is too confusing, print out our map Oxford: By Day & By Night for a pocket guide to local recycling points.

If what you want to recycle is not quite rubbish yet, you may wish to try giving it to someone who can turn it into treasure. Oxford Freecycle is a web-based group which enables unwanted items to be exchanged without financial transactions or trips to the tip. You don't need to have a Yahoo email account to join the group either - just follow the "join this group" link on the first page. Orinoco Scrapstore has been doing the same thing with paint, scrap materials and tools collected from businesses for years, with the added advantage of a small warehouse you can visit like a shop. They also have bring-and-swap days.

Not-for-profit company Oxford Wood Recycling takes useable industrial waste timber and turns it into saleable firewood and wood for other home uses.

Environmental Mobile Control Ltd is a firm who will take away your old mobile phones, recycle them, and give money in return, to you or your nominated charity. See their site or call Recycling Manager Liz Simpson on 01283 516259.

Combine recycling, healthy living and social beneficence in one easy move by getting a bike from the Oxford Cycle Workshop, 39 Magdalen Road, east Oxford. A cooperatively-managed social enterprise promoting cycle use in the city, it's the only bike shop in town dedicated to recycling or reusing old bikes through reconditioning and repair - whilst also offering training in related skills. See more on bikes and such below.

Recycle clothes by shopping at vintage and charity shops (see our list of them, complete with synopses of what the charities do) with the added benefits of raising money for good causes and looking unique!

In addition, you might like to investigate the following resources:

• Oxford Brookes Environmental Information Exchange: 'a forum for the exchange of environmental information, primarily amongst small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) in Oxfordshire'.

• Reusing is even more useful in terms of energy/waste management than recycling. Click here for info on where to refill printer cartridges in Oxford.

• Recycling in Headington (full guide to facilities).

• Emmaus Oxford Furniture Store collects re-usable furniture, electrical appliances and other household items, and then re-distributes them to people on benefits and low incomes. You can also buy their products from them (discounted if you’re on benefits, an OAP or a student, full price if you’re not). Call 01865 763698 (Monday-Friday, 9.30-12.30) or email furniture@emmausoxford.org

• Want to reduce waste in your community? Community Action Groups (5 in Oxford, 12 countywide) are volunteers who organise litter picks, swap shops (bring and takes), green shredding days and other events in their local area. More details on their website.

• The City Council's Recycling Directory has useful suggestions in alphabetical order for what do do with specific items.

• Paths to Freedom This excellent website documents the progress of a Californian family who "have worked away at transforming their ordinary city lot in Pasadena, California into an integral urban homestead." They support 4 adults on one fifth of an acre, which produces over three tons of organic produce per year, and are gradually reducing their dependence on non-renewable resources. So if you enjoyed "The Good Life" in the seventies, find out how to do it for real.

Healthy Living

You are what you eat, they say. Organic food is available from an ever-increasing number of Oxford outlets; at Daily Info we rather like the takeaway Alpha Bar in the Covered Market and Uhuru Wholefoods on the Cowley Road. The Alpha Bar has a sister shop, The Woodstock Deli (next to Brown's Restaurant on Woodstock Road), and a café/restaurant at the University Church on the High Street. There are farmers' markets in east Oxford, Headington, Wolvercote and central Oxford, and several organic veg box schemes cover the city: have a look at our Festivals, Fairs & Markets and Food Shopping pages for specifics.

You can buy 1kg of Fair Trade items including cakes and tea bags (440 bags for £8.99 - at around 2p/bag, that's possibly cheaper than Tescos and definitely better for everyone concerned) at Oxfam on Broad Street and Cowley Road. A broader range of gift items and household goods can be found in the Fair Trade shop beneath St Michael at the Northgate Church on Cornmarket. If it's chocolate you're after, you may be interested to know that all of the Co-Op supermarket's own-brand chocolate is Fairly Traded.

Our page on Pick Your Own farms in the Oxford area can be found here; they tend not to be very organic but our proprietor holds that it's the only way to get properly fresh sweetcorn.

Also while we're on the subject, you may wish to explore this page from the website of The Ecologist Magazine with all sorts of useful food-related links. In fact, their website is a great place to start for all sorts of things sound and sustainable.

Other Useful Stuff

Oxfordshire Green Pages is an annually-issued green directory for Oxfordshire containing 80+ pages of listings for all aspects of green living, holistic health, community and social justice.

What can you do to minimise your ecological footprint to a dainty size 3? Look to your energy use for starters. Good Energy is one site offering electricity on a 100% renewable basis. Ecotricity is another. An interesting article (again from The Ecologist) about how this works (or doesn't) is available here.

The Energy Saving Trust - for which the Thames Valley Energy Centre is the regional advice centre - can, as you might expect, tell you how to save energy. They also have a free, impartial energy saving advice line (0800 512 012), send out energy packs on request and can do short presentations for local community groups.

Commonwheels, east Oxford car club, has a fleet of cars available for loan to members. They're all parked in marked bays in local streets within a few minutes walk of thousands of residents. Members can book the cars online or over the phone for periods upwards of half an hour and are charged (by monthly invoice) according to the length of booking (£2.50 or £4 an hour) and distance travelled (first 10 miles free, next 100 miles at 25p per mile, 19p per mile thereafter). Rates include fuel. Members each get a smart card to open the car when they have a booking. As demand increases so too will the fleet, ensuring cars continue to be  available for last minute bookings. Car clubs offer access to cars without the financial hurdles of ownership, improving mobility across the community. They can also reduce congestion: each established UK car club vehicle replaces between 5 and 11 privately owned cars, and the figure is higher in London (www.carplus.org.uk). If you'd like Commonwheels in your area or would like to join the mailing list for the Oxford scheme, email info@commonwheels.org.uk.

Get healthy and save the world in one smooth move: convert your car into a plant pot or a climbing frame (or donate it to Commonwheels, above!), and use some sustainable transport. Cyclox exists to encourage Oxford's citizens to get on their bikes, with fun events, maintenance advice and campaigning; Sustrans offers UK cycle route maps and more; Liftshare helps us all feel less guilty about those essential cross-country trips by enabling journey-sharing. See also our page on Public Transport in Oxford. The newest addition to provision in this field is OxonCarts, Oxford's very own bicycle rickshaw company, available for hire 7 days a week.

Got your own publication, and concerned about the environmental effects of producing it? Oxford GreenPrint is a small, friendly, environmentally-conscious and affordable printing and design company based in East Oxford. If you need more comprehensive green office supplies (from copier paper to loo rolls and coffee), try Bristol-based Green Stationery (www.greenstat.co.uk).

A shocking number of readily available fish are becoming threatened and even endangered. See fishonline.org for lists of what to buy and what to boycott. You might also be interested in Taras Grescoe's Bottomfeeder, a Bill Bryson-like tour of fishing communities and survey of what's left in the sea and how to help stocks recover.

You can buy rainforest as a gift (for a friend or simply for future generations) at many places on the internet. We favour doing so through the World Land Trust, because David Attenborough is one of their patrons, so they're likely to be reliable. It costs, at time of writing, only £25 / acre (that's 208.7 feet x 208.7 feet).

Always fancied the idea of keeping chickens, but never got round to doing anything about it? Here's a chance to rectify the situation and do something nice at the same time: by rehoming the hens regularly cast off by the battery farming industry (saving them from becoming the chicken flavouring in soup, pot noodles and crisps). Unsurprisingly, these birds tend to be great layers, and will live 4 or 5 years after rescue. They can also make great pets! Visit the fabulously comprehensive Battery Hen Welfare Trust website for full details: www.thehenshouse.co.uk.

This page added thanks to the helpful suggestion of one of our readers.
Something missing? Do let us know!