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My first blog entry - my journey to a lower carbon lifestyle

Posted Tuesday, 19 January, 2010 at 4:46pm
in

The journey starts here...

I have been thinking about reducing my personal carbon footprint for a while now. I have signed up to the 10:10 campaign. I will be signing up for the 20:12 campaign by WinAcc.

My current carbon footprint (household) is over 9 tonnes per year. I have an energy monitor which is currently displaying the greenhouse gass emissions of our local library which has a display of our up and coming events related to our low carbon living project - see www.alresfordgreening.org for more details.

Recycling

At home I currently compost all my kitchen waste soon to be cooked aswell as uncooked food scraps. I recycle batteries, tin foil, cardboard, paper, plastic, tin, bottles. I am planning to collect milk bottle tops and recycle tetrapaks.

Home

I have booked a local company to fill my cavity walls with recycled glass fibres on this Friday. I will complete the loft insulation over the coming weeks. All the insulation in the loft is B&Q recycled plastic (85%). I hope to board out the loft aswell to help.

So far we have 10 or more energy saving light bulbs. i am testing out a lower energy halogen and an LED in the bathroom. I plan to change all my kitchen lights over to LED - however we have plans for a new extension which will feature in my blogs.

We have also registered to change our energy supplier from N power to Ecotricity. We hope to change over to green gas when this becomes available.

Work

As a wildlife consultant I have been working on reducing my travelling. I have been outsourcing my work to local sub contractors to reduce the carbon emissions involved in travelling hundreds of miles across the south of England. I also have plans to convert my truck to run on pure vegetable oil - see www.veggiepower.co.uk

I have also been looking at my materials that i use for my work and I am trying to source ethical and environmentally friendlier products. My business will be launching a new website and I plan to put this onto an alternative energy powered web server.

There is plenty to talk about as I go through various parts of the house, work, holiday plans, christmas to try and reduce the carbon emissions.

More to be posted soon

Jon C

Comments

Reducing my footprint further

Submitted by Jon Cranfield on Wed, 2010-02-24 12:07.
Just like to add that we now have organic cow's milk delivered to our door by our local milkman - we will be adding organic butter along with as many organic products we can afford. Why you ask? well organic means less oil used in producing the food coming into our household Local meats - equals wild meats My local butcher sells all sorts of 'Venison' - deer, rabbit, pigeon etc are all venison - i.e. it is hunted okay shot around our village. Wild meats are much more ecologically friendly compared to farmed meats - so I have also asked my butcher if he can source some grey squirrels - they are a pest to forestry and an invading non native species - as they are being shot around our town why not eat them! The same goes for local freshwater fish - hopefully I will be able to obtain some lovely local fish for trying at home - as sustainable local fish and chips!

look out for wildlife events and news in Alresford - www.alresfordwildlife.org

Re: Reducting Carbon Footprint

Submitted by CompareGasAndElectricity (not verified) on Sat, 2011-08-20 20:04.
It sounds like you have been making some really solid progress at reducing your footprint. Make sure to check to see if their are any tax rebates for some of the home improvements you've made. These rebates may provide savings that you can use towards other environmentally-friendly updates you may be considering. There should be a website that has a cost-benefit analysis of all of the home improvements that can be done. This could help convince people to take advantage of the low hanging fruit as far as energy efficiency is concerned. Although, you top tips section does provide some very useful advice and is definitely a good place to start.

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