Q What should I do with my old camera?

A Let me guess, you’ve updated. It happens to the best of us. One minute we’re promising to stand faithfully by our film-based cameras; the next we’re skipping off for our summer holidays with a skinny-sized digital model.

But if you’ve gone digital at least you won’t have to feel guilty about the manufacturing of film. It has a murky environmental track record, involving lashings of boiled bones (in the form of gelatine) and methylene chloride, a known animal and a suspected human carcinogen.

Thank God for eBay. Fully functioning cameras should fetch a decent price; if you’re feeling charitable you could offer it to your local Freecycle forum (freecycle.org ).

Return a Kodak camera to the mothership and the company will do its best to recycle the parts, says Rob Lightfoot, Kodak’s recycling manager; call 0870 8500020.

It has already teamed up with processing labs to recycle 70 per cent of its single-use cameras. Not that it should detract from the fact that single-use cameras remain an unsustainable way to take pictures.

Better to embrace the digital age than to buy a new camera every time you go on holiday.

Q Should I trust textile banks in car parks and outside supermarkets?

A They wouldn’t be my first port of call. Generally speaking, they work like this. After you shove in your clothes – and hoping that a child hasn’t used the bank to get rid of its milkshake – the contents are picked up by a private contractor who sells it on to a textile trader. A portion of the profit will go back to the charity advertised on the outside of the bank.

Environmentally, this is no bad thing. What matters is that your clothes are not going to landfill, where woollen garments will produce methane, contributing to global warming, and synthetic products won’t decompose at all. Ethically, however, there are complications. The majority of the 900,000 tons of textile waste the UK produces every year ends up being sold in the developing world. Yes, this is successful recycling and textiles are being redistributed in places where cheap clothing is needed, but it has been argued that dumping our rejects disrupts local economies and has contributed to the collapse of textile industries in countries such as Zambia.

You’ll be glad to know that not all charities hop into bed with rag traders. To cut out the middle men, Oxfam (oxfam.org.uk/shop/shop finder) has its own recycling plant, Wastesaver, in Huddersfield, for textiles that it cannot sell in its shops.

My other favourite charity shop, Traid (traid.org.uk), uses all the textiles donated to create one-off pieces for its own-label fashion range.

Don’t be too disconcerted by the idea of your old blouses entering the international textile trade; remember that all of your recycling becomes a commodity once you have offered it up to the green bin men. Like everything else, it is driven by market forces, not charitable ones. This is what ultimately will sustain the recycling process.

BLOGWATCH

When The Times revealed two weeks ago that work had begun on several new nuclear power stations, I asked what you thought about it on the blog. The answer? Not much. The consensus was that this was not an answer to our planet’s problems. Many of you said you were unhappy about toxic waste being left behind for your children to deal with.

Claire’s view was typical. “Nuclear is not the answer,” she writes. “I wish I knew why the Government is pursuing this option when it is staring us in the face that we should be reducing our consumption and investing in renewable energy.”

GREENIE POINTS

DO IT

Hosting a children’s party has been made easier by Ethical Party Bags, a company selling green gifts for children. Fairtrade chocolates and toys made from recycled materials are stored in bags made from old juice cartons. (ethicalparty bags.com; from £3 a bag)

CLICK IT

Climate change campaign Global Cool features a CO2 workout card on its website to provide an incentive to shift your personal emissions (global-cool.com ). A focal point for responsible celebrities, such as Sienna Miller, it plans to persuade a billion people worldwide to reduce their carbon emissions by one tonne a year.

SKIP IT

In an attempt to move from orange to green, easyJet has unveiled plans for its ecoJet, which would cut carbon emissions in half. Friends of the Earth pointed out that it will take too long to develop. Greenpeace said: “As long as companies like easyJet promote a binge-flying culture, our chances of dealing with climate change are scuppered.”

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