As usual I’ve probably missed the boat on this as we’ve had enough rain recently to last until the end of the year!
But, finally I have installed my 210 litre water butt.
I realise that this does nothing to reduce my carbon footprint, but (no pun intended) I do believe that it has an impact on the environment and saves water. This is one of my bug bears with only concentrating on carbon emissions to combat global warming as there seem to be so many other factors to take into account!
As you’ve probably heard the weather here in the UK has been pretty awful over the past few weeks. Actually on the south coast we’ve had it pretty easy with only a small amount of localised flooding, so we really have been lucky!
Anyway, one of the side effects of this rather dramatic increase in moisture has been an over enthusiastic growth in the slug and snail population. Now normally I’m a kind of live and let live type of guy, but the bastards ate my lettuces.
In a post that I thought I had made but looking at it I haven’t (so look out for my veg patch post – coming soon) I am trying to educate my (almost) three year old daughter on where things come from; veggies, fruit and meat.
The excessive number of slimy creatures in my garden seemed determined to stop this education process, so I’m trying to despatch these little menaces as humanely as possible.
Any ideas other than beer or slug pellets would be helpful!
OK it probably will not look or taste anythink like this but at least it’s ours!
When we moved into our house a little over two years ago we noticed to one side in the garden was a fairly big apple tree. For the first couple of years it really didn’t really produce much in the way of fruit, but this year! I don’t know if it’s because of the unusually sunny April we’ve had or the extra rain we’ve had over the past few weeks but the trees actually bending under the weight of the apples. So, in an attempt to relieve the poor tree we removed about 5kg of apples and then wondered what on earth we were going to do with them. Not being one who likes to waste food we decided to try our hand at making something.
A short while of looking through our recipe books and surfing the net we came accross an old book which had mainly preserves and pickles in it, which is where we found a recipe for ‘Apple, Onion and Mint pickle’.
An afternoon of chopping slicing and dicing has left us with five 750ml jars of pickle that now needs to sit for about a month. By the end of August the pickle should be ready to eat (apparently it’s very good with cheese!) and I will make a post telling you all about the flavour, the smell and whether it was a worthwhile process.
If in the meantime anyone else has any recipes for using up an abundance of cooking apples then please feel free to send them to me.
Is Carbon Offsetting a valid environmental tool, or is it just a way of relieving peoples guilt? Whilst generating a huge wealth for the people doing it!
In my previous post I mentioned the carbon offsetting that Get Green Now offered me. For the sum of £188.70 I could offset all the excess carbon I was producing and feel so much better about myself.
Well I didn’t really think much about this at the time, but as the days since my last post have passed this has played a little on my mind! I haven’t really researched this, but this is more of the joining of the ramblings in my mind.
Whilst we may all feel better having offset our carbon, has it really achieved anything? Many of the carbon offsetting companies basically (probably over simplified) plant trees/ reforest land to try and absorb more carbon from the atmosphere and in turn produce more oxygen and therefore redress the balance. My main problem with this having thought about it for a few days is, ‘we’re still producing the same amount of Carbon‘. Surely the best way of reducing carbon emissions is to reduce our carbon footprints! OK so more trees is probably a good idea and very pleasant to look at, but if we’ve produced less carbon is it really neccesary? Anyway, the few trees these companies are planting really are nothing compared to the hectares of rain forest being destroyed on a daily basis, but that’s a rant for another day!
It seems to me that really the only reason to carbon offset as opposed to reducing emissions, is to relieve the guilt we feel, make us feel better about our footprint and stop us having to actually do something about it!
OK, as promisd I have now calculated my Carbon Footprint. Well actually I calculated both my personal footprint and one for our household. I’m going to concentrate on the household footprint in this post as to me it seems the most relevent, and we are going to tackle this subject as a family/ household.
So, here we go! I used two of the calculators I recommended the other day; firstly, to see if I got roughly the same answer from both calculators, and secondly, they had different levels of detail.
The first calculator I tried was the one on the the get green now website. This is the least complicated of the Carbon Footprint calculators I tried. It basically asks you for your energy bills (gas & electric), the type of car you have and annual mileage and the type of air travel you do. This calculator made my Carbon Footprint 18.87 tonnes per year, made up of 11.27 tonnes that I directly produce and 7.6 tonnes that I indirectly produce. I presume this is the carbon industry produces on my behalf making things that I might purchase. This seemed very high to me, but it gave no info on the average household figures. Conveniently, after completing my calculations I was offered the oportunity to ‘Offset’ our families carbon emissions, just by paying an amount of £188.70, I could even do right there and then online.
The second calculator, Act on Co2 was a great deal more involved and went into the electrical equipment you have around your house, the number of low energy lightbulbs etc. I feel that this was the more accurate of the two I tried but I suppose in the end the results were fairly similar! The second footprint was calculated at 18.36 tonnes of carbon per year. But, this time I was told that the national average was 10.22 tonnes. Now, what wasn’t made clear was how this average was derived or indeed whether it compared like for like, i.e. a mid sized house with four occupants, with a similar house or just taking all households and averaging it out.
Either way our carbon footprint is too high and I need to do something about it. So, I’ve given us a target, we are going to reduce our footprint down to at least 15 tonnes per year.
There are many ways I can do this, but before I post the methods I’m going to use I’m going to fully research them and make sure they are viable and realsitic for a young family to do. I have two young children, one 3 and the other 4 months, we need to use the washing machine, but I can lower the temperature we wash at, things like that. I have to admit probably one of the worst parts of our footprint is the number of cars we have, three in total and a motorbike, but I’m a petrol head, what can I say – it’s my passion!
My only problem with calculating ‘Carbon Footprint’ is that it doesn’t seem to take into account other environmental things you may be doing to save the planet, like recycling, reducing and reusing, it only looks at carbon emissions and that doesn’t seem like the whole picture to me.
Look out I’m on the hunt for new ideas!
Myself, my wife and the two Skimmerlets are off to a local hotel today, to meet up with the rest of our clan from all over the country, to help celebrate my Nan’s 90th birthday!
It should be a really good to catch up with everyone over an extended lunch and I’m sure the wine will be flowing quite freely.
I don’t see my Nan perhaps as much as I should, but having a 4 month old really seems to eat into any time that’s available, as cantankerous as she can be she really is a quite remarkable women, and if you met her you would never say she was ninety.
So, keep it up Nan and here’s to a few more years! (I’ll post some pictures if I get a chance later!)
According to recent news on the BBC site, McDonalds are going to convert all of it’s fleet to run on biodiesel by next year.
What the story doesn’t make clear and I can’t seem to find out from the McDonalds site is whether the oil being used will be virgin oil or reused cooking oil from their network of restaurants. The firm said it was “delighted” to be putting its large stock of cooking oil to a “practical, efficient use” within its own business. But, does this mean really they’re just trying to save money by using a fuel that is cheaper for them than regular diesel (because of the volume they buy) and giving it an envirnmental spin or are they really trying to reduce carbon emissions?
You decide!
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