A few small steps at the time

There is progress – yippee! OK I shouldn’t exaggerate, I haven’t managed to turn into a green hero overnight, but I have made some small steps.

First of all I actually did sign up for paperless billing for both the phone, gas & electricity and the bank and just as I thought, it took me less than 10 minutes to do all three!

Secondly I have made a great discovery: there is a local green group and they have a website which gives links to lots of local stuff. (http://www.linlithgowclimatechallenge.org.uk) . Now this is useful! There are lists of local green events, I realised I can actually borrow a smart meter from the local library (once I get round to sorting my library card of course) and I can even get local gardening advice. Who knows next year I might get some beetroot, that has more than just the tops and onions bigger than pinheads...

The website also gave me the link to the local Freecycle group, which is something I had planned to join for a long time, but along with all the other things never really got round to doing. Freecycle is a network where you can advertise useable stuff you no longer want and other people in the network can then pick it up if they can make use of it(http://www.freecycle.org/). It is a great way to recycle, especially since the charity shops often have restrictions on what they can take. Obviously I still haven’t got round to putting any of my excess stuff up for grabs, but joining is an important first step (isn’t it?). As a footnote signing up for freecycle also made me think I had become extremely popular all of a sudden, the amount of e-mails in my inbox almost tripled – I should probably change my settings on how to receive info from them...

Looking at the website also made me a bit more optimistic about my whole project, because I realised that there are things that I do already, but I hadn’t really thought about when listing my green credentials. For example it is suggested to sign up for Mail Preference Service to avoid some of all the junk mail – I did this years ago. Originally I just did it because I was joining Tele Preference Service to avoid all the horrendously annoying phone calls you get about new kitchens and double glazing and I stumbled upon Mail Preference Service along the way, but now I can pretend it was a green choice I made a long time ago. I also realised that there is an option to avoid some of the mail that still gets through (stuff addressed to ‘the occupier’ etc) by sending letters to them. Obviously this is a bit more of an effort job, because you have to write to each individual company, but if I put it on the to-do list it might happen eventually. It actually made me think that I should start a campaign for the same system that exists in Denmark, where you can go to the post office and get a sticker to put on your letter box saying ‘No ads, please’ and the postie will then not put any leaflets etc through your door. Hmm, something to think about when I have a couple of minutes spare.

Anyway the morale of all this is that it is definitely worth investigating what is already happening locally. You might not have to re-invent the wheel yourself and if the advice comes from a local source it is much more likely to be relevant and achievable, than some generic ‘cover all’ websites. I have a strong feeling that discovering this group is going to be quite helpful for my green project.

The last really positive thing on the green front is that my daughter is beginning to be more accepting of the fact that we walk to local places, so much so that this morning she got upset when I said we were going to school by car. (My husband has damaged a ligament in his knee and sometimes struggle to do the usual walk to the train station, so we had to give him a lift). In the end I had to promise to go to the train station and then come back home to park the car before walking to the school. Well done, girl. This might obviously change when the usual rainy weather returns, but for now she definitely deserves applause.

There might just be a bit of green light at the end of the tunnel.