At risk of getting trouble with MoneyObserver, who send me a monthly email newsletter, I reproduce the following article on ethical investment performance verbatim (yes Stewart this probably is a bit spammy) :

'The average ethical fund has fallen 9.1 per cent over the past year compared with a 5.75 per cent drop for non-ethical funds and 8.56 per cent for index trackers. Twelve months ago the average ethical fund ourperformed its non-ethical counterpart by 3.3 per cent over the year.

Those who have read earlier posts, will know about my impatience with information recycling on the internet. Especially annoying are the lazy regurgitations of press releases without further analysis or triangulation (fact checking to you and me). The main perpetrators? The press, lets leave the PR people alone for now.

In the seventies young Italian men, and older ones too, carried 2 things in their hands. Their car radio in one and a clutch bag, il borsello, in the other. I vaguely recall my older cousin may have had one and so did an uncle, both stylish chaps, and bus conductors often had them too. By the time I could have afforded one, they had been banished to a footnote in the history of fashion.

This morning after I picked up the chariot from the menders I decided to dispose of the ugliest ever Christmas tree holder. With the main family stakeholders away I popped into our local recycling centre (funny how everyone we know still calls it the “tip”.)

The world’s most successful retail loyalty scheme, Tesco Clubcard, launched Green Clubcard points in August 2006. The programme claims over 13 million active member accounts – you probably have one too, even if you don’t want to admit to it. Like other schemes, card holders typically earn 1 point for every £1 they spend in stores, online and through selected partners, like E.ON the energy company.

Tesco sticks out for a number of reasons, not all of them good. Notwithstanding the criticisms of many Tesco policies, it is difficult to challenge the success of their loyalty programme, which is comprehensively documented in Humby, Hunt and Phillips’ fascinating 2003 book “Scoring Points”.

Twitter, the technological equivalent of a noisy dawn chorus that wakes you at 4:00 am, is really quite cute if you remember to set your quiet / sleep time settings.

Hardly breaking news, but courtesy of twitter we picked an interesting item on greenwash following the publication of the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) annual report. It shows that in 2007 it received over 500 complaints about environmental claims, compared with just over 100 the year before. The subjects of the ASA's censure included some of the usual suspects from Shell and Ryanair to Toyota for practicing "greenwash" – ie misleading consumers on their environmental practices, or benefits of their products and services.

So going green is costing entrepreneurs £3.1b? We thought this news deserved a closer look. The finding comes from the entrepreneur think tank, the Tenon Forum. Who? Perhaps not well known for their green street cred, it turns out they have a few green ideas (green tax credits) while running annual surveys of green attitudes among SME MDs. Much as we dug, we are still none the wiser as to the definition of "entrepreneur" and where all that £3b actually went. (Funny how a whole load of old rags published the story uncritically word for word straight from the press release. Never mind.)

It was just a matter of time before John Lewis played up its environment credentials further, so we were keen to take a look at their brand new eco pages.

As you would expect the pages are stylish, just like the rest of the site and the navigation is clean and easy - something they have always done admirably well. Their idea is somewhat similar to what B&Q did when they re-arranged parts of their inventory into green categories for a special leaflet shoved into Saturday newspapers (and Sunday ones for all we know - we don't buy them any more, Saturday's last the week end!).

Over the next couple of weeks we are going to take a good look at some of the eco rewards competition.

There's competition? Yes. We were going to do a short piece like "How Does Ecomonkey compare with other Green Rewards programmes?" but then discovered a bit of a gap in independent reviews. So, we start by looking at the behemoth of loyalty cards, the Nectar Card.

Boosting the Green Points cashback across all their product listings heralds a significant shift in the Ecomonkey Green Rewards programme.

From late yesterday all Green rated products get 100% cash back as Green Points.