Go4Green

The terrifying lure of the car

2008-08-08T09:38:00.000-07:00

My husband and I are going to a wedding in Oxford this weekend, which is about 90 minutes from our home. I voted to go by bus; he wanted to take the car. My arguments were good: we'd save money on fuel; we could come straight back after the wedding instead of having to sleep off the booze on a friend's sofa; we wouldn't have to worry about parking; and – most importantly – it was the green thing to do.

Despite him agreeing on every single point, we are going by car. This made me reflect not only on who wears the trousers in our relationship but on just how hard it is to get people to stop using their cars.

I thought fuel prices might do it but a survey released today showed that, for some people, even petrol reaching £2 a litre wouldn't stop them driving. As the price creeps up, we seem to accept it as inevitable and quickly adjust our sense of value.

If neither our conscience nor the cost can do it, what on earth can?

Biofuels: bad or brilliant?

2008-07-18T10:43:00.001-07:00

As far as I can tell, bio fuel is a startlingly brilliant bit of science, whose reputation has been sullied by some bad execution. If "sustainability" means protecting the planet's resources and not using up the share of future generations, then bio fuels are the key: we only burn what we can grow. Unfortunately, old fashioned economics created some unintended consequences such as Indonesian farmers cashing in on a demand for palm oil by chopping down the earth's CO2 sponges - the rain forests - to make space to grow their crops. But let's not throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. If we can regulate properly, and trace the bio fuel we use back to well managed farmland and conscientious farmers, then we may just have the solution to climate change on our hands.

2008-06-20T08:14:00.001-07:00

Local isn't always best

Funny old thing, food miles. Carbon footprinting means that we now know that it is better for the environment to buy flowers flown in from Kenya than to choose a bunch from countries nearer home, like the Netherlands. Apparently, the emissions from aeroplane fuel are offset by the efficient way they are grown: basking under the African sun requires no fossil fuel, unlike Europe's heated greenhouses. The same applies to lamb shipped in from New Zealand - despite a rather epic journey to get here, these joints are believed to have much less 'embodied carbon' than their English cousins because of their good weather and farming methods. Confusing, isn't it?

Throwing away our cash

2008-06-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

According to the government quango WRAP we Brits throw away a third of all the food we buy. They estimate that the nation drops 5 million untouched potatoes into the bin every day, along with over 4 million apples and 700,000 sausages. This waste is costing the average household £420 a year (£610 if you have kids) which is a shocking way to be spending our hard earned cash in the current economic climate. It'll cost us the planet too as all this organic waste turns into climate-damaging methane in our poorly ventilated landfill sites. So it's time for us all to start checking use-by dates and getting creative with leftovers.

Milk in a bag!

2008-06-11T09:48:00.000-07:00

Sainsbury's have just taken the bold step of testing whether it can sell us milk in plastic bags instead of bottles. The idea is that you buy one of their special milk jugs that fits in the door of your fridge, and then fill it up with these bags. I'm instinctively nervous about hauling around little plastic sacks full of milk in my shopping bag but I'm sure they have given them a thorough road test. In which case: what great news! Those two litre milk bottles are the thing I feel guiltiest about throwing away (our local authority is being a little slow getting around to recycling plastics) so I shall be embracing this new idea with enthusiasm.