Over and out (almost)

This is it - we have now spent 12 months trying to become a green household. Funnily enough I expected this blog to be a nice little round up of all the stuff we have achieved - but I don't know if somebody is trying to send me a message. I usually do my updates in the beginning of the week and it is now Friday and despite several attempts this one just doesn't seem to happen, latest issue was the almost completed entry that just disappeared! 12 months I have been doing this and that has never happened before.

I am now wondering if I am being told that it is not time to close this project?

So I have decided to take a different view: phase 1 is over, phase 2 can begin. Phase 2 consists of continually going forwards! We can't go backwards on all the good work we have managed during phase 1.

Phase 1, the original challenge has been good and fun and educational, but it has also been annoying, tiresome and sometimes blooming awful. But that is how it works with lifestyle changes, they don't happen overnight. They happen gradually and that way they become set as new habits and routines, and that is the real change.

Being green is definitely a scale, we started somewhere on the very light green side and we have moved a fair bit towards the more shiny green side, but there is a long way before we would be completely green. We haven't ditched the car, we haven't installed solar panels and we generally still live like a pretty ordinary family. Nobody is going to enter our home and think 'wow, they are certainly green' (they are probably more likely to think 'has the hoover broken...), and that I think is good. Because I didn't set out to change our lives completely, I wanted to find out if it is possible to follow some of all that advice out there and still have a happy family life. I think the answer is yes.

What I didn't realise was the profound effect this would have on the way we think. We might not have moved a lot from an outside point of view, but I do believe we have changed our thinking - the environment has taken a much higher priority in the way we live.

So to check if we have actually achieved something or if I am just happily imagining stuff, I decided to calculate our carbon footprint again. I did this in the beginning of the challenge using the Governments Act on CO2 website and we had a footprint of 12.88tonnes per year. When I calculated it again on the same website earlier this week our footprint had been reduced to 9.57 tonnes per year. I think that is pretty good. We have shaved 3 tonnes of CO2 of our footprint in one year and that is without investing hardly any money in it. Imagine what it would look like if we had spare cash to install solar PV or a wood burning stove or super insulate our house etc.

Obviously the carbon footprint doesn't say everything (I have on several occasions ranted about the uselessness of this measure), but on this occasion I will take is as proof that we have actually achieved something.

Not that long ago my brother suggested to me that going green is a bit like raising kids, they change little by little and all of a sudden you look back and realise how big they have become. That is exactly what we have been doing this year. Little by little we have changed habits and looking back I actually think it adds up to a rather big step. But just like children never stop changing and learning, green living is a continued process and honestly from that angle we probably haven't even reached school age...

But before we embark on green living phase 2 I will leave it to my 3 year old to sum up this experience. At the dinner table I asked how everybody thought we had done throughout the challenge and he very promptly shouted 'goood'.

May the green work long continue.