Save the world from home

It’s always tempting to point the finger at other people, businesses or nations when looking for environmental scapegoats, but we all have a responsibility to look at our own lifestyles and see what we can do to reduce our carbon emissions. After all, those big smoke-spewing factories in China are making stuff to satisfy our consumerist demands!

Again, a good starting point is to find out your own carbon footprint. This will help you to understand which aspects of your life are causing the most carbon emissions and therefore what needs to change first. There are several on-line carbon calculators such as the WWF’s https://footprint.wwf.org.uk/#/

A few hints and tips:

· Don’t try to do everything at once – take a step-wise approach, starting with the easiest or cheapest things that make the most difference, such as installing loft insulation.

· Think about what’s most essential in life, as well as what scores the highest numbers. For instance, heating our homes burns a lot of carbon – but you do need to be warm. Whereas overseas flights are a less painful thing to cut back on.

· Swim against the tide of materialism. We are bombarded with adverts and keeping-up with-the-Joneses pressures to constantly want more; but everything we buy costs carbon to produce and will probably mostly end up in landfill. Every pound you spend can either make the world a better place or a worse place, so shop mindfully: think about where that product has come from, who made it, whether you really need it, how much use or pleasure you will get out of it, and what will happen to it once you’ve finished with it.

· Finally – be positive! It can sometimes seem that being green is all about having to give fun things up. We have sleepwalked into a way of life in which we accept polluted air, cheap plastic goods and sitting in traffic jams as inescapable. But a low-carbon society is also a society in which the air is breathable, the streets are safer, your neighborhood is full of nature again, you are healthier and you have more time for your family and community.