Reducing our carbon footprint (Phase One)
My wife Helen and I have spent many hours working together on the various plans and challenges involved in tackling our carbon footprint. Frequently we would comment how good it was to have two brains to help us understand the complexities and the pair of us working together to provide support and challenge through the various ups and downs of the process. Helen was (still is) the first Carbon Buddy.
When we first started around 2007, to be honest, we were as much driven by trying to cut down the annual running costs of a large house. Our personal carbon footprint was only rather vaguely in the back of our minds .
So we swung into action. We had the loft properly insulated, we replaced all our old drafty windows with new double glazed units, we installed a wood burner, and by doing this we halved our oil central heating bill. We were left frustrated because we wanted to insulate our cavity walls but it turned out that the gap was too small and it was technically too risky. We were also persuaded to invest in some early stage technology which efficiently stored the heat from solar thermal tubes in wax filled cylinders. Great idea, sound physics, but the software for controlling it was a nightmare, I accidentally set it wrong, and the next morning the wax had expanded so much it overflowed and broke the casing which enclosed it. Disaster.
Then they brought in the Feed in Tariff for solar PV panels. On paper this was a very good investment. We were lucky to have a space at the bottom of the garden which was invisible to our neighbours so we were able to get planning permission. It’s a nice feeling to know that we are generating electricity for the grid.
All these things took quite a lot of time and brain space to research and organise. Over time we found ourselves doing lots of smaller easier things, motivated partly by saving money but also increasingly by awareness of climate change and global warming. We replaced almost all our light bulbs with LED’s (for ages there were not good replacements available but over a few years the supply changed dramatically and the unit prices came down). And then we rather ran out of steam. We knew there was much still to be done, but the next steps were far from clear.
At around the same time, I had read Nicky Gardner’s Slow Travel Manifesto. This sounded like it could offer much more fun than grappling with renewable energy technologies. Over the years travelling round Europe, I had become increasingly suffocated by “destinations” like Barcelona, Venice, Rome and Florence, all beautiful, but increasingly scarred by ‘overtourism’.
The Slow Travel Manifesto made me start thinking about how I might travel differently, more lightly, more enjoyably. I started taking my Brompton folding bike Brava to Italy, (going one way by plane and the other by train and ferry), choosing areas where I could travel locally by train, bus and ferry and using Brava to explore locally and for shorter rides between smaller towns off the tourist trail. I became expert at finding flat areas to visit! I’ll talk more about these trips at some stage because they began to change something about me and my relationship with the planet.
Colin Hastings
