A. As my husband is a bit of a computer geek at heart, I let him answer this one. Here's what he said:
"Hi Christian. While you can opt not to print web backgrounds and images by tweaking your web browser's settings, I think you'r
e looking for something that'll let you select specific bits of text.
If that's the case, I've come across a really useful tool that'll let you do exactly this. Evernote is a clever little widget that you can download from
www.evernote.com.
Once installed, it enables you to highlight specific bits of text or images and save them to a file for later viewing or printing. You can select whatever part of a web page interests you, save it to a file, edit and search it by keywords, and print everything out into one document.
It'll save you a fortune in ink and paper as you won't have to print out any adverts, backgrounds, text or images that aren't relevant to your research.
It's a very handy application that embeds itself in your browser and is great for keeping track of all sorts of things you might stumble across on the web, so you can go back later and check it out.
It'll even save links, so you'll have no trouble returning to the original web page. Best of all, it's compatible with PCs, Macs and many mobile devices."
So there you go. I hope that's answered your question Christian. Don't forget to print on both sides of your paper to save even more trees from being pulped.
Q. What's the most eco-friendly bunch of bananas I can buy? I know they're transported thousands of miles, but I couldn't live without a banana smoothie for breakfast.
Ann Finchson
A. A mainstay of most lunchboxes and fruit bowls, the first commercial refrigerated shipment of bananas reached these shores just over a century ago. Since then, we've developed quite a taste for the fruit that comes with its own natural wrapping.
Britons spend more on bananas than any other product – apart from lottery tickets and petrol – with sales worth a whopping £750 million a year.
Despite its superfood credentials – it's rich in fibre, vitamin C and potassium – banana production is far from green. In fact, after cotton, bananas are the second most sprayed crop in the world, regularly drenched in pesticides to keep them disease-free.
Add in the food miles involved in transporting bananas halfway around the world, the cost of refrigeration and the fact that almost all bananas are artificially ripened using ethylene, and the humble banana doesn't look so eco-friendly after all.
You can salve your conscience a little bit though, as most bananas are shipped by boat, which is 100 times less polluting
than going by air, and the fruit is a crucial source of income for many developing countries.
If we were all to stop buying bananas tomorrow, the economic and social effects on these countries would be devastating, so don't give up your banana daiquiri or banoffee pie just yet.
In answer to your question about what's the greenest banana you can currently buy, you have a couple of options: Fairtrade or organic.
Actually, it isn't a choice you have to make any more, as you can now buy bananas that are both fairly traded and organic. Buying a Fairtrade banana guarantees a decent price for producers including a social premium that's spent on health and education projects for workers while organic bananas are grown using natural fertilizers and natural methods of weed and pest control.
According to the product finder on the Fairtrade Foundation website (
www.fairtrade.org.uk/products), you can buy organic Fairtrade bananas from branches of Waitrose, Somerfield, Sainsbury's, Morrisons and Lidl as well as a number of independent grocers.
