It is estimated that the IATA issues over 400 million tickets annually, with around 16% of those currently being in paper format. Specialist printers were ordered last August to print the final batch of some 16.5 million paper tickets to last 60,000 accredited travel agents around the world. From Sunday, all use of those tickets will be stopped.

The move will not only have obvious environmental benefits, but will also save $9 (USD) per ticket, which would total up to saving an incredible $3 billion (USD) every year. Perhaps that can go towards those fuel price hikes, eh?

For years now, I’ve booked flights and checked-in online, but it always seems to be the case that you get to the airport and still end up with bits of paper to actually get on the flight. I think it wouldn’t be too much of a step further to go digital for boarding passes, too. There have been talks of allowing some sort of connection to mobile phones to receive data that acts as your boarding pass, but I’ve yet to see it successfully implemented. Let’s hope it’s not far off.

The stadium as it is, is made up of several layers, which includes a base of 25,000 seats, an upper framework and a top tier of 55,000 seats. The idea is that the top level can be removed, split into sections and transported to Chicago for reuse. This would leave a 25,000 stadium for further use in London and allow Chicago to reuse those 55,000 seats for their stadium expansion.

It’s a great idea for lots of reasons. There’s no need to mention the environmental benefits of reusing a seat tier of that size, but it would save both cities a significant amount of money. Chicago would save more on their building works, whilst London could recuperate some of that hard Olympic pound they’ve been flaunting.

The reason Illinois has come into play is because they’re currently favourites to host the 2016 Olympics. However, in reality it could easily go to any of the Olympic bidders. I particularly like the idea that it gives poorer countries a much greater chance of hosting, as there would be a significant reduction in the costs of running the events.

So how well will all this go, and just how likely is it to happen? Well, it’s certainly not the first case of stadia reuse. The Cricket World Cup in Barbados reused some 16,000 seats from one of Germany’s World Cup 2006 stadiums to great success. The project needs to be carefully planned to ensure it can easily be taken apart and all the different sections fit easily onto cargo ships. A nice aside is that construction has started ahead of schedule. It’s easy to be cynical of England’s flagship building-work, but let’s hope it all goes to plan.

I went for a picnic in the park on the Bank Holiday Monday just gone and didn’t bother putting any sun cream on. I honestly didn’t expect it to be that hot, but I quickly regretted it as I now have red arms and legs. I’m not even a sun-bather, but I can see how quickly the sun can get to you. From a 2006 study in Europe, the UK has the highest skin cancer rates for children, aged 0 to 14, and teenagers, aged 15 to 19.

I think it’s because living in England we don’t always see the sun as a big threat and so we often go without the sun cream or don’t bother using the high factor stuff. At a time when global warming is making every other headline, it makes sense that our little part of the world is getting hotter, too.

The labelling of Sunscreens will actually be changing next year, due to the need for higher factor cream.

Two important tips that I pulled away from BAD’s press release were to do with applying sunscreen and I wasn’t doing either of these previously.

• • Apply sunscreen thickly – The considered ‘bare minimum’ of application is around 36 grams (six full teaspoons), but applying too little significantly decreases the cream’s affect and means you need to reapply it much more quickly.
• • Reapply at least every 2 to 3 hours – And also immediately after swimming or anything else which may have caused the cream to rub off.

So slap that lotion on when you’re out. I actually can’t bear it in the sun anyway, I’m always looking for the shade. Finally, if you’re at all worried, BAD remind everybody that mole checks are completely free! Just get in touch with your GP.

When 2.2 million people in Sydney all turned off their lights for an hour in 2007, it reduced their overall energy consumption by over 10% for that hour. I think that’s a pretty neat achievement for something so easy to do. We had a similar thing shortly after with Lights Out London and that worked, too. This year, WWF have decided to take the step a little further by asking the entire world to participate. Come March 29th 2008 at 20:00, all you have to do is turn off your lights for an hour.

Of course, it won’t be the world all taking part at exactly the same time; the action will take place as each time zone hits 8pm. Current capital cities that have announced coalition include Bangkok, Chicago, Copenhagen, Dublin, Melbourne and Montreal. You can see the full list of entrants here and more are expected to join over the month.

I think Earth Hour is a good idea simply because of how easy it is. A lot of environmentally friendly acts can take time that people generally don’t have to spare. Being able to join in something so easy that makes a big difference, is exactly the kind of thing anybody can get involved with. It’s like how recycling used to be so difficult years back, you’d have to pile up everything and wait for a chance to visit the bottle banks and then drive elsewhere to recycle all the paper. Now in the UK, virtually everywhere has weekly recycling collections for most types of packaging and that’s easy for everyone to do.

Earth Hour won’t really save the world, but it’s a decent step that gets you thinking about how easy it is to save energy here and there. Plus you can help no matter where on Earth you are at the time.