Did you know that it’s not just in your home where you can be renewable? In fact, your garden is the ideal place to start getting into the renewable habit. For the keen gardeners out there, why not take the renewable choice and start using peat-free compost to get you started?

Traditional peat compost is obtained by stripping out peat bogs which can release carbon into the atmosphere and destroys the natural habitat of the indigenous wildlife. Once dug up, it can take hundreds of years to replace. A great alternative to this is to use peat-free compost which is made from recycled materials, making it a closed loop solution.

Using organic waste in this way helps to bring down the amount of waste we send to landfills, which means we are releasing less pollutant gases. As the waste comes from organic sources, it means there is a never ending supply and therefore renewable source of materials to produce more peat-free compost.

From professional gardeners to the budding green-fingered Sunday gardeners, everyone is being urged to give peat-free a go. It’s good for your garden and can cut down on your carbon footprint – so what are you waiting for!

For more information on peat-free compost, you can visit the Recycle Now “Know Your Compost” campaign to pick up hints and tips about peat-free gardening.

We’ve seen loads of great entries to the Your Renewable Idea competition already. The level of voting shows people love not just Tetra Pak’s donation to WWF for every vote cast, but also the ideas themselves.

A few people have asked why the competition is focussed on renewability, not the wider concept of being ‘green’?

Well, firstly, who can actually define ‘green’? No-one. Because one man’s ‘green’ is another man’s environmentally unfriendly. And what does it encompass? Recycling, transport, food, climate change? The list goes on. ‘Green’ is too broad a term for anyone to be able to measure and agree on targets and progress.

So, why ‘renewability’? Well, if we are to create a sustainable, long-term way of living, we need to focus on what products are made from, not just what we do with them when we’re done with them. Well:

Renewable resources are natural resources that, if looked after properly, can be managed to supply our demand at a sustainable rate – so those resources consumed are replaced.

So, whilst we still need to consider things like recycling and using recycled materials, if we focus on the renewability of the materials we use, we solve the biggest single part of the challenge – we stop using the earth’s resources quicker than they can be replaced.

That’s got to be everyone’s focus, right? So, make sure you enter your ideas and vote for Your Renewable Idea.

Recycle Week 2010 is just around the corner (21-27^th June), and it’s a great opportunity for us all to think a little bit harder about what we can do, as part of our daily lives, to be more green.

This year’s Recycle Week is all about your Waste Electrical Equipment (WEE), but when it comes to recycling, don’t for get your Tetra Pak cartons. Over 86% of the country has recycling facilities, and 26% can even put them in your kerbside collections. Find out what’s on offer in your area at Tetra Pak recycling.

But recycling is only one step in living a greener lifestyle. Living a renewable lifestyle is important too. As naturalist and TV wildlife presenter Steve Backshall put it “Renewability: the fourth R. Reduce, reuse, recycle, choose renewable… supporting Tetra Pak’s campaign with WWF-UK is the perfect way to get started!”. So, why not use Recycle Week as an opportunity to go one step further, and come up with your idea on how we can all live more renewable lifestyles? If you’re not sure what renewable really means, there’s our definition, and we’re looking for your thoughts too. Remember, there’s £25,000 available to make the winning idea a reality, £1,000 for the winner themseves, plus goodies just for voting on your favourites.

And who knows, maybe in a few years’ time it won’t be recycle week, but ‘renewable week’…?

Your Renewable Idea is all about innovation.

Innovation in how we live, to encourage more renewable lifestyles.

Innovation in how we think, to develop long-term renewable communities.

And, of course, innovation in how we campaign – involving everyone, every step of the way.

If you’re struggling for inspiration, why not take a look at these innovative businesses WWF has highlighted. They are all examples of where people have thought differently to achieve their environmental aims. Or if you just need a bit of fun to get you going, why not try our brainstorm tool in the corner of this page!

If we don’t innovate together, we won’t become more renewable. Think of the great inventors: Da Vinci, Bell, Dyson… if they were starting out today they’d be looking to tackle the renewablity challenge too.

We’ve been thrilled with the response to the campaign so far.

People are embracing the point of the campaign: we all need to increase understanding of renewability in daily lives, and we need everyone’s ideas to make that happen.

So, thanks to Brenda, Greenbie, Karen, Rachelle, Piper and many more for spreading the message far and wide.

We’ve seen loads of people tweeting about it (follow Renewable idea on Twitter) and sharing the campaign Facebook page. But we need more – we need you to spread the word yet further, to get your friends to vote for the best ideas.

And remember, more votes = more donations to WWF from Tetra Pak….

Were selected last week!

Catherine Kerbel won a WWF adopt an animal tiger just for voting on their favourite idea.

Meanwhile Josh Cuby’s renewable mobiles idea got the most votes in the first couple of weeks, and he gets £100 of renewable shopping vouchers to spend in the WWF shop.

One thing we wanted to highlight was the core mission of the partnership; driving awareness of renewability. Most people struggle to understand what renewable means, or why it matters. This is exactly why we are calling for ideas of how we can get people to think and buy renewable, so people understand it 100%. Renewable resources are a natural resource that, if looked after properly, can be managed to supply our demand for resources at a sustainable rate – so those resources that are consumed are replaced. Wood, wool, hemp and corn are all examples of natural, renewable resources. When looked after properly, we can keep on using these renewable resources for years to come and they won’t run out.

We have been getting a lot of great green ideas, with a lot of the ideas focussing on how we can get people to re-use products or recycle them, but we want to make sure everyone putting the time into coming up with ideas that are eligible to win the overall prize (£1,000 for the winner and £25,000* towards making the winning renewable idea come true) and that will help us meet our challenge to get people thinking and buying renewable. So please do let your creative juices flow and see what ideas you can come up with that will help us meet the renewable challenge.

There’s a long way to go before the winning renewable idea appears later this year, but the ideas entered earlier have a bigger chance of totting up more votes, so keep entering your ideas and voting!

We get asked this a lot, and after some head scratching, we came up with this definition:

Renewable resources are natural resources that, if looked after properly, can be managed to supply our demand at a sustainable rate – so those resources consumed are replaced.

Makes sense, as a concept, but it needs to be easier for people to understand, and needs to be made relevant to everyone’s daily lives. That’s exactly why we need your help in the Your renewable idea challenge.

Why not let us know what you think – maybe you’ve got a different definition, or have questions?

Either way, to get you started, we’ve listed some types of materials made from renewable sources, but you must make sure they come from responsibly managed sources…

Looks cute, right?

Well Persian leopards like this one can be found in the Russian Caucasus region that we are working with WWF to ensure these forests are properly certified and managed. But they need our help to secure their forest habitat (in the Caucasus) can be protected for many generations to come, and WWF are doing everything they can to ensure that happens.

So, how can you help? Well, every vote or idea you cast will mean Tetra Pak donates to WWF, to help them in this vital task.

So it’s easy – vote, enter and encourage your friends to do the same (how about via Facebook or Twitter, for example?). The more we all share our renewable ideas, the more money Tetra Pak donates to WWF to look after the forest’s rare species like the Persian leopard live in.

So, why has a packaging manufacturer (Tetra Pak) and an environmental group (WWF) got together to ask you for Your renewable idea?

Well, put simply it’s because we don’t have all the answers. But we’re confident you do. Rather than tell you how to live more renewably, we’d rather you told us how you think we can all think and act more renewably, and we can then help make it happen.

But what have we done together before? Well, WWF and Tetra Pak have a long-standing partnership in many countries across the world. We are both committed to making sure that we all reduce our impact on climate-change by promoting and driving the uptake and use of responsibly managed renewable forest resources.

Tetra Pak is a member of WWF’s Climate Savers Programme, and has an overall goal of reducing its total carbon emissions by 10% by the end of 2010. Tetra Pak is also a member of the WWF Global Forest and Trade Network (GFTN) in the UK and Sweden. The GFTN is WWF’s initiative to eliminate illegal logging and transform the global marketplace into a force for saving the world’s valuable and threatened forests. By facilitating trade links between companies committed to achieving and supporting responsible forestry, the GFTN creates market conditions that help conserve the world’s forests while providing economic and social benefits for the businesses and people that depend on them.

So, we believe living more renewably is key. But we know it needs to be more widely understood, and easier to do. And that’s where you come in… Enter your idea or vote on your favourite today and get a chance to win some great prizes, whilst helping us raise money for WWF.