As many of us strive to make sustainable and ethical choices it is not surprising that in a world where ?there is an app for that?, help is just a tap away. To get you inspired, we’ve put together a roundup of five great ethical apps that are not only FREE to use but also incredibly useful and help you to do good too!
Olio – The app that helps you share spare food
We all know that food waste is rubbish for the environment, but it is not great for your bank balance either. Households up and down the country throw out an incredible ?13 billion pounds worth of edible food each year, averaging about ?700 pounds per household.
Olio aims to stop that. Their app connects neighbours with each other and volunteers with local businesses, encouraging people to share food that would otherwise go to landfill.
It is simple to use and completely free. Users just snap a pic of their unused food, add it to the app and then wait for a neighbour to come pick it up. Easy peasy!
Eco Buddy – To calculate your carbon emissions
Sometimes it is hard to know just how carbon-heavy our choices are. This awesome free app lets you chart your personal carbon footprint by keeping track of your food and transport choices.
Enter all your meals and any transport you take into the diary each day, and the app calculates your emissions. But it does so much more than just show you some figures. You can chart your daily emissions and see if things are going in the right direction and the app offers personalised suggestions on how you can change.
If you are feeling proud of your progress – or you are in need of a little peer pressure – you can share your figures on social media or with friends and family.
Charity Miles – To raise money for your favourite charity while exercising
Need an extra incentive to get active – then this is for you! This free app allows users to donate money to charitable organisations for every mile they run, walk or cycle. Organised events like charity runs usually require participants to solicit donations themselves and can be hard to fit around busy schedules. This app allows you to do your own sponsored activity, in your own time and without any fundraising.
Once registered, just select a charity of choice and then get exercising ? Charity Miles does the rest.
So where does the money actually come from? Well, this is the clever bit. Charity Miles allows corporate sponsors like Johnson & Johnson and Brooks Running, to repurpose their media budgets for something a little more worthwhile. These budgets are normally destined for advertising, so, Charity Miles delivers premium, high-quality advertising with a great ROI in exchange for some of their marketing moola. The result is a motivating fitness app and some much-needed cash for worthwhile causes. Everyone?s a winner!
Refill – Showing you the nearest free water bottle refill point
Despite having some of the best drinking water in the world, over 7 billion plastic water bottles are used in the UK each year. If those bottles were refilled just once a week, that would stop a huge 340 million plastic bottles at source.
Plastic is catastrophic for our oceans and plastic bottles make up one-third of plastic pollution in the sea.? But it is not just waste, the production of these bottles creates millions of tonnes of carbon emissions each year. If that is not enough to convince you then the money might – bottled water costs 500-1000 times more than tap water!
Exploring new cities or rushing from one meeting to the next is thirsty work, and it often feels easier to buy a bottle of water. The refill app is here to change that. All you need to do is download the free app and then the refill map will show you the nearest free refill point – it may even be closer than the shop.
Helpful Peeps – Get help when needed?
You have heard of the ?sharing economy?, well Helpfulpeeps is here to introduce the karma economy! With the idea that our collective communities thrive when we help each other out, this app connects helpful volunteers with those that need a little help.
From cat sitting to brushing up on holiday French, this app lets users ask for help when they need it and then return the favour when they can. It is free to sign up and once registered users post a request for assistance, or browse the feed for someone they can help.
As an added little incentive, each time a user does a good deed they get ?karma?, which goes towards their overall ?karma score?. Not bad uh?
