Green Ice Policy

The snow that has covered Scotland for more than 3 weeks is finally beginning to disappear. It has been very unusual to see this much snow and for such a long time, and I have loved it! It is fantastic that we built a snowman before Christmas and the remains are still there. I much prefer the white snow cover to the endless rain we usually have. This weekend we had a great trip to the zoo, we could see all the animals very easily - they didn't camouflage very well in the white snow.


It has obviously caused a lot of problems as well, because somehow we are never really prepared for snow in this country, and I do empathise with the people who have been having a hard time, but what it has also done is highlighting how far down the list green priorities are for the councils. This morning it took me 40 minutes to do the school walk, not because we had forgotten the lunch box and had to run back for it, not because my 2 year old refused to walk (both of which can happen...), but because the so called 'safe route to school' hadn't seen a snow shovel or a single grain of grit since the white out started. The path was more slippy than an ice rink and in some parts people were hanging on to fences and lamp posts just to be able to stay upright.

Now I fully understand that priorities have to be made and this extended period of frost and snow is unusual and therefore maybe difficult to deal with for the Councils, but I am not sure I agree with their choices.

Scotland has the World's toughest climate bill with a target of reducing CO2 emissions by 42% by 2020. How in the world do they expect to achieve anything near that if they can't even ensure that children are able to walk to school? One of the strategies to cut emissions is to get people to stop driving on short journeys, and the school run definitely comes in that category, but if the road to school is dangerous, there is no chance of people ditching their cars.

I am usually quite persistent on walking to school, even when the weather is showing off its darker sides, but I honestly considered taking the car at pick up time - rather a bit of CO2 than a broken leg! In the end I did walk, only to discover that the path was in fact even worse than in the morning (all the thawing and refreezing is very unhelpful), and we ended up walking back a different route that is twice as long and on the main road - so far from a safe choice.

I don't want to sound like some grumpy person with nothing better to do than complaining, and I fully agree with the fact that they didn't grit the path as a first priority - the schools were closed afterall, but the snow had eased off already last week and they knew the schools were due to return after the Christmas break, so why didn't they at least attempt to make the path safe? A lot of people use this path and surely it is in the Council's interest to keep the kids safe?!

The fact is that making things safe for pedestrians during this snow spell has received very little attention. The Council's focus has been on the roads and thereby encouraging people to get in their cars. But what about the people who don't drive cars, like some elderly people - how are they supposed to get out.

I think it is time for the Councils and the Government to rethink the priorities. On one side they run ads in the radio telling people to drop the car for short journeys, but on the other side they do nothing to make this a safe option - what kind of a signal is that to send?

Maybe it is time for a radical change, e.g. in Denmark it is the house owner's responsibility to keep the pavement outside their property clear. Sure that can be a real pain, if it has been snowing overnight you need to get up even earlier to do some snow shovelling before work, but I can assure you it is a lot safer to be a snow pedestrian in Denmark than here.

Anyway until the Councils get their act together and get a green ice and snow policy, I shall continue my daily debate whether to persevere with the walking and risking to put myself in the category of eco idiot (especially when I fall and split my head open) or to cave in and go by car. Hmmm...

New Years resolution

We have now entered 2010 and as always we have to make a New Years resolution. My resolution is to eat less chocolate! Why? Does chocolate have some kind of adverse impact on the environment, you might ask? It probably does, I don't really know, but what I do know is that you should never make New Year resolutions about anything important, because they never last. The chances of me eating less chocolate are about as high as the chances of me winning the lottery, but I do recognise the fact that from a health point of view I should be eating less - so the perfect resolution, I should stick to it, but it is never going to happen...


The question is if I were to make a serious new years resolution, what would it be? There are many issues I could go for. All the obvious ones (no, not losing weight) such as saving energy, eating less meat, using the car less, saving water, buy local, grow my own food - the stuff we are already working on. I have just signed up for the 10:10 campaign - save 10% on your energy usage in 2010, but this is not a resolution, it is a commitment.


I could make it a resolution to try even harder next year to have less waste at Christmas. Despite my efforts, this Christmas was still a scary experience from a green point of view. My kids received so many presents, that after the high of opening boxes, my five year old just sat in a corner looking rather overwhelmed and feeling upset that she didn't know what to play with. We have to find some way of limiting the presents next year - it is just too much, and even half the amount of stuff would be more than plenty for them. Anyway, I have almost a year to figure that one out, so a bit silly as a New Years resolution.

What would probably be a useful New Years resolution would be to learn some more facts about peak oil and global warming. As this green family project is growing quite a few people seem to have the urge to question me about all things environmental. Some of them are almost trying to challenge me to convince them that global warming is real, because like a considerable part of the population they are sceptical. The thing is I am not a scientist, and most of the scientific figures can be interpreted in many different ways anyway, so it would be pointless for me to start some explanation that I probably wouldn't even understand myself. Frankly the specifics of how global warming is happening (or not) are irrelevant to me, but what is very relevant is the unsustainable way we live.

80% of the Earths resources are used by 20% of the population -so where would we be if everybody on the planet lived the same way as us??? It doesn't take a math genius to figure out that this will not hold up in the long term. We can continue the way we are at the moment and hope for some kind of miracle to happen, or we can try to start a change now? Personally I don't really want to take the risk and that is why this green project is too important to be a New Years resolution. So my wish for 2010 is that it will be a year of discovery and learning and by the end of it we will have made lots more green progress, one step at the time. Now where was that chocolate...?

Christmas wish list

It can be rather difficult to be festive and green and the same time! 2 weeks ago I wrote about the measures I am taking to make our Christmas slightly greener this year, but I am slightly concerned that I blew absolutely everything this weekend when we had 14 people over for a christmas party. Not good! Well the party was good, but I think we just about blew a weeks energy use in one day... (Fact is I haven't had the guts yet to read the meters, so I don't know for sure, but I have a strong feeling that when I do the weekly readings there will be a massive spike). I always knew that the usage would be slightly higher than normal, but I hadn't realised how having guests can give you completely different priorities for the day. (Unless all your visitors are eco-freaks like yourself!)



We left the heating on for most of the day, because we obviously didn't want people to get too cold. Lights were left on in most rooms downstairs all the time, because people were moving around, and where as normally I know which lights burn a lot of energy and avoid putting them on, obviously this was not the case for all the party guests - so the heavy duty stuff was going. I found myself switching a few lights off from time to time, but who wants to be a party pooper?!

I think a fair bit of food probably got wasted as well. Everybody had brought a contribution to the party and we had loads of food, but a lot of people didn't feel a big urge to take home leftovers, and I can't really blame them, because I had no desire either to eat my way through the food mountain.

Thankfully I didn't have a hangover the following day, but I did spend a bit of time wondering how to make parties less wasteful and energy intensive. The thing is it would have to be done discretely, if you start a party off with asking guests not to switch the lights on and bring an extra sweater, you have kind of ruined the party spirit.

The best I have come up with so far is getting better energy sources. Unfortunately renewable energy is pretty expensive to install, so it would probably be many years before I could have a green energy party, but I did a search anyway to see what might be possible. I went on to the Energy Saving Trusts website (www.energysavingtrust.org.uk ), they have a tool where you input information about your house etc and you then get an idea about what might be suitable for your house.

A wind turbine is out of the question, we are afterall in the town and the size of the garden doesn't amass to several acres of land. Hydro power isn't really an option either as it needs a source of water, and we don't have a river flowing in the back.

The options that we might have are a wood fuelled boiler, a wood burning stove, an air source heat pump, solar electricity panel or solar water heating. Wow! I wonder what it all means?

I have never been a techy person and despite diagrams and all sorts of other stuff on the website, I still haven't got a clue how any of this works. Well ok, I do know that a solar electricity panel converts energy from the sun into electricity, and a wood fuelled boiler is obviously a boiler fired by wood rather than gas or oil, but exactly how it would all work in our house is still a mystery! How do you put in a wood burning stove, when your property hasn't got a chimney? How much electricity do you actually get out of a solar panel? Can these things work together or does one exclude the other? All sorts of things to wonder about.

The biggest question of all is obviously how much would it all cost. According to the aforementioned website from the Energy Saving Trust these are the approx costs you can expect: Wood fuelled boiler: 9k, wood burning stove: 3k, air source heat pump: 5-9k, solar electricity panel: 8-14k and solar water heating 3-5k. It is possible to get grants for some of these things and I believe low cost loans are available as well, but frankly we can't have any energy consuming christmas parties for a long time if we are to get enough money together for any of that.

So I am down to my very last option if I am to have a more guilt free party next year:

Dear Santa,

I have been very good this year and I have made several changes to my lifestyle in order to help stop all the ice on the North Pole melting. Please, please, please can I have some kind of renewable energy installed in my house both to help secure your workshop and to make it possible for me to enjoy some more christmas parties. I promise I will work even harder next year to be green. Thank you.

Love from
DG

PS. Please watch out for my new apple trees when you land in the garden, they are still a bit fragile


Merry Christmas everyone, enjoy the festive season!

Green cleaning

I am not a clean freak by any standard, but considering Christmas is here and lots of people will be coming to the house I figured it was time to make the dirt less obvious. I have been using various green cleaning products for quite a few years (after all that is one of the easiest ways to make a green choice), but if you look at the ingredients they still don't look that healthy, so I decided to do some quick research on alternatives. How to have a 'cleaning-chemicals-free' house?

It turns out there are lots of websites out there telling you how to clean with ordinary household products rather than squirty stuff from a bottle, so I thought it was time to put some of them to the test. The most urgent issues to address were the bathrooms and the windows (my 2 year old thinks it is great fun to lick the windows - he keeps saying 'mmm, tasty!)
I quickly realised that the 2 must-have products in green cleaning are bicarbonate of soda and white vinegar. Bicarbonate of soda can do all sorts of things, but the main thing is to work like a scouring powder, so for cleaning the washbasin or bathtub, just sprinkle some on a sponge and scrub away. It does seem to work, the washbasins were just as sparkly as when I use liquid spray-on bathroom cleaner.

It also has the advantage of not filling the air with some synthetic flower smell, but maybe that is just me being weird. I have never really understood the thing about air fresheners and strong smelling cleaning products, I find them headache inducing and it is my firm belief that the best way to get fresh air is to open the window. The smells also tend to give away the fact that I have frantically been running around cleaning just before any visitors arrive, even if I am trying to pretend that my house is always clean...

For cleaning the toilets I had 2 options to try out. One was to pour white vinegar in and leave it overnight, the other was to put 4 Alka seltzer tablets in and leave them for an hour. Both options supposedly gives you sparkling clean toilets and as we have more than 1 toilet I decided to test them against each other. They both kind of worked, but I am not sure either are the ideal solution. There is something strange about cleaning toilets with painkillers and since Alka Seltzer is an American brand there is probably quite a footprint connected to getting it here as well- so I would have to look for a British alternative if I was to continue. The toilet was clean though. Likewise the toilet came out looking nice with the vinegar, but this option had even more down sides. First of all the whole bathroom smelt of vinegar, which is not the most enticing of smells (even worse than air fresheners). Secondly because the vinegar needs to be left in overnight it requires a bit more planning and can't really be used in toilets that (like one of ours)gets used during the night. The main problem however with both options was the fact that the products only worked in the water area, so the sides of the toilet bowl didn't really get that much of a clean - not fantastic. I might just stick with my usual commercial green toilet cleaner for now.

White vinegar can also be used for making your own glass cleaner. There are lots of different versions on the net, but the one I followed was something like 2 cups of water, 1/2 cup of vinegar and a drop of washing up liquid. Put it all in a spray bottle, mix it well, spray on the window and wipe with newspaper. It works really well!

There were lots of other things I could have tried out, e.g. cleaning the oven with bicarbonate of soda. Apparently if you put a thickish layer of the white stuff in the oven, moisten it with water and leave for quite some time, at least overnight, you can then brush the bicarbonate away and all the dirt and grime will follow. Needless to say I never got round to trying it, frankly I hate cleaning the oven and I had absolutely no desire to test it, but if anybody wants to have go, please let me know the result.

My biggest discovery in green cleaning I think are microfibre cloths. I already exchanged my disposable kitchen cloths a few months ago for the washable microfibre option, and they are good. When rumaging through the cleaning cupboard this weekend I came across a microfibre bathroom sponge/cloth. I have a vague recollection of buying this thing on sale, but it must have disappeared into oblivion at some point during the house move. I can't remember how much I spent on it, but whatever the price it was well worth the money. It takes away the dirt no problem and without using any cleaning agents at all (the website for them is http://www.e-cloth.com/). Honestly it is a godsend for anybody who like me dislikes cleaning and just wants to do it quickly (that should be just about everybody then...).

So what is the conclusion on green cleaning. Well green cleaning products from the supermarkets are a better option than normal chemicals, but there are other options out there - and they are cheaper! From now on my main cleaning product will be a microfibre cloth and if things get really nasty I will sprinkle a bit of bicarbonate of soda. I shall never spend money on window cleaner again, a bottle of vinegar is cheaper than any ready mixed product and I dare say better. The one exception will be toilet cleaner, I haven't found the right substitute for that yet.

Obviously there are many more aspects to cleaning, and at some point I shall have to do some more investigating (although I don't think non electrical hoovers exist??), but for now I have made a start. With a bit of luck I will be spurred into action again next Christmas when I get another cleaning panic...

Green christmas

Christmas is coming! In fact Christmas is here! We have reached the peak of the consumer year when we all seem to loose the plot and start running around frantically spending money and having a good time... Somehow the whole thing doesn't sit that well with trying to be green.

The thing is I generally like the festive season. It can sometimes get stressful, but it brings a lot of excitement and positive things (e.g. my children get dressed in record time so they can get downstairs and open their advent calendars) and for the kids it is an amazing month. So my challenge is how to make this a green Christmas (chances of a white Christmas are very slim anyway thanks to global warming...). How do I make this season slightly less excessive without turning in to the Grinch?

If looking around for advice on the Net the information you get is actually quite similar to normal green behaviour, e.g. recycle as much as possible, plan you food (you don't actually need to buy double the normal amount of food, nobody will be going hungry anyway), buy local, compost all your vegetable peels, avoid disposable plates and cups (if you are short get some from the charity shop or borrow from your neighbour), choose cards made from recycled paper or better still send e-cards, think about your wrapping etc. I haven't really come across anything groundbreaking or exciting that totally grabbed my attention and made me go 'of course - I should have thought of that!'

So unfortunately I have had to do a bit of thinking(!) to figure out the best ways to green up our christmas. Where can we make improvements that won't spoil the christmas spirit? This is what I have come up with so far:

• We are not buying any new decorations. We already have quite a collection, but if we need additions we will have to make them ourselves! (I have actually broken this rule already, because I have ordered a wreath for the door, but it is made locally from locally sourced holly that can be composted afterwards, so I am almost excused)


• Use of wrapping paper will have to be minimised. Apparently we use 8000 tonnes of wrapping paper every year, equivalent to approx 50.000 trees - that is a lot. These are the solutions I have come up with so far: I am going to wrap most presents in material. I have dug out old curtains, old table covers etc and I am going to cut them into nice pieces and use them for wrapping presents. After the mayhem on Christmas morning I can then gather all the pieces, fold them up and put them in the christmas box ready for next year! I have even experimented with sewing gift bags for the items that are likely to reoccur, such as CDs and DVDs.
• Another thing I have tried out is using empty boxes from the kitchen, e.g. cereal boxes, tea boxes. If you open the sides gently you can turn them inside out, glue them back together and you then have a nice plain box ready to be decorated and filled with presents - it actually works. Sure enough this takes a bit longer than wrapping with paper, so not very appealing for my lazy side, but once I got going it was quite fun and my daughter was very happy to join in.
• Admittedly some presents will have to be wrapped in paper - my five year old just might get suspecious if Santa's present is wrapped in the old table cover- but my target is not to need to buy Christmas wrapping paper for the next 10 years. Thanks to the previous owners of the house we have a decent supply (I think they forgot to look in the attic), and I am going to work on my skills to wrap presents without using sellotape, so that I can collect most of the paper back and reuse it next year.


• I have ordered a turkey from the local farm shop - yes I finally found a shop. Well strictly speaking I haven't found it yet, because I placed the order over the phone and I am yet to venture out and find the actual building, but the risk of a Christmas without a turkey should be enough incentive to get me there. Hopefully I will also be able to get some of the other food from there, in order to make it a more local christmas.


• I think I have managed to convince the family that we can get DIY crackers and fill them with edible stuff rather than getting another collection of plastic gimmicks. OK, crackers in general are probably still a bit on the wasteful side, but at least the content can disappear into our tummies rather than the bin. Somebody should invent a reusable cracker, then you could just put a new filling in every year.
• There will be a proper cover on the table rather than a paper one. I have never used disposable plates etc for Christmas, but for several years I have bought paper covers, because I didn't have anything that fitted the table properly. I have now spent £20 on buying a piece of Christmas material, which I can hopefully use for many years to come - this is called long term investment!

We will however still be sending christmas cards out. There is not much point in sending e-cards to elderly relatives with no computer and my daughter is unlikely to accept sending e-mails to her friends when everybody else are swopping cards, but maybe over time we can bring the numbers down. Maybe I should get my daughter to do her own cards from some recycled paper?(I might also include a reminder for people to recycle their card afterwards...)

What I probably won't do this Christmas is go back to the library for a loan of a smart meter - it would be heart breaking to see how much energy is actually used. I wonder how much money the councils spend on Christmas lights in December - it can't be cheap?!

Does all this make our Christmas green? I don't know, but at least I am trying and if nothing else some of the above things should be saving us a little bit of money. I am sure there are lots of other things I could do, but Christmas is all about traditions and we can't really make new traditions in just one year - so this is a start.

I wish you all a happy green Christmas!