Going Green - One Year On 10 Feb 08
On the eve of Mad Eejits hosting the Carnival of the Green for the first time, I thought it might be worthwhile to look back on our first year of trying to be more eco-friendly to see what we’ve achieved.
A lot of the easy changes were made in the first six months, during which we:
- Switched to Electricity from Renewable Resources by filling in one simple form online
- Bought and installed a compost bin, which takes nearly all of our kitchen waste
- Started recycling our glass, rather than just moaning about the council not collecting it.
- Improved our overall recycling, reducing how much we put in the landfill bin
- Fitted more low energy bulbs and stopped leaving on lights that aren’t really needed (e.g. in the porch and hall)
- Switched to reusable bags for our shopping and started reusing our food bags.
The second half of the year brought some trickier challenges but we managed to:
- Switch Ben over to reusable nappies which had its issues, but its working well
- Change over to toiletries with less packaging
- Swap to more eco-friendly cleaning products
However, in my challenge to start walking to work, I failed miserably. Its just one of several things that I state changing jobs as my reason (or excuse) for not doing.
The good news though is that I’ve asked my new employers about setting up a Cycle to Work Scheme and they appear to be seriously considering it. This combined with a proposed office move, that would give me an almost entirely cycle-path route into work, means that my new challenge is to get on my bike instead.
Another challenge for us, is to do more of our shopping ‘locally’, resisting the convenience of the seemingly all-conquering supermarket chains. Sarah’s already made a start on this, favouring (walking to) our local greengrocers and butchers over the equivalent aisles and counters that we pass during our weekly supermarket shop. Now we want to see what other areas we can extend this to.
Over the year I think we have made some significant progress but we still have more to do. As we’ve always said, its important that we make small, sustainable changes that gradually build up to a bigger lifestyle shift, rather than changing everything at once, finding we can’t adjust and just giving up. Hopefully, 2008 well see us progressing further in the right direction.
Posted by Nev in Family Life , Going Green with tags baby, ben, bike, carnival of the green, compost, cycle to work, disposable nappies, eco-friendly, electricity, energy saving bulbs, green, recycle, reusable nappies, reuse, shop local, toiletries, transport, waste
