Bring about an end to carbon crimes: a new pledge to cut your carbon every week


I’ve only just discovered The Guardian newspaper’s Tread Lightly campaign. It’s a wonderful idea. Every week the paper carries a new pledge for you to sign up to. All of the pledges involve ways of cutting your carbon footprint and becoming less impactful on the natural resources of the world. This week’s pledge is to switch from bottled to tap water.

Tread Lightly is a community of people, and includes a blog section where you can join in debates and share CO2-saving ideas.

The aim of the site, and the pledges, is to enable people to step up their efforts to reduce their own CO2 emissions, to track the combined efforts of the community, and provide a space in which you can be reassured you’re not the only one who cares and is willing to change.

You may ask, what’s wrong with bottled water? Well…

Read the full article.

Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

tags: , , , , , , ,

Carbon footprint survey reveals our household is doing better than we thought


I was surprised and pleased when I calculated our household carbon footprint today. Presumably because we take near-zero foreign holidays per year—statistically, looking at a period of 10 years—and therefore don’t fly, and because the car is only used for anything more than a kilometre or two at weekends, when our mileage increases by a fairly huge amount, our carbon emissions per annum are allegedly around 9.6 tonnes. That’s 54.2% below the average of other people who have completed the same online survey.

But the survey doesn’t take account of repurposing old goods through community share schemes like the Freecycle Network, or the fact that we’ve been able to massively decrease the amount of material waste destined for landfill by other means as well.

Read the full article.

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

tags: , , , , ,