TROUBLE BREWING
It is easy being green, discovers Tom Ough – just follow these tips and Planet Earth will thank you
I’m expecting two visitors this afternoon. One of them is Kate Haines, an environmentalist who runs greenfinder. co.uk, a website that salutes the most ecofriendly products on the market. The other is the delivery man who’s dropping off a thick parcel of cheap clothes I bought online the other day, a transaction through which I’ve supported both the fossil fuels industry and the fast fashion industry. This could be embarrassing. I nervously check the delivery email. Yep: it’s this afternoon. Gulp.
An hour later, the doorbell rings. I dash downstairs – it’s the delivery man. “Thank you,” I say. Thank God, I think. I carry the bag, made of nonrecyclable plastic, back up to my bedroom, and leave my shameful secret at the foot of the bed.
Haines arrives. She’s a slight 44-year-old who has come by train from Leamington Spa to assess my home, which I share with two friends, on its sustainability and ecofriendliness. Her top is made of Tencel, which is a sustainable fabric that comes from wood cellulose. From her backpack, in which she’s carrying a stainless steel water bottle and a reusable coffee cup, dangles a rubbery little globe in which she stores the few plastic bags that come into her possession. She’s perfect for the job. Too perfect. I feel like
I’ve called in
Gordon Ramsay to watch me make a sandwich.
We start with the fridge, and there’s some good news straight away: I’m vegan. “Top marks,” says Haines. Cutting out meat, dairy and eggs is the single biggest thing most people can do to reduce their carbon footprint, says an Oxford University study.
The bad news is that being vegan doesn’t make you whiter than white, and it doesn’t make me greener than green. Our fridge contains a few things in plastic packaging and a lot of stuff that’s had to be flown into the UK. There’s some avocado in a sauce, there are chia seeds in some bread I baked, and there’s a carton of almond milk, whose manufacture requires an egregiously high amount of water.
Speaking of which… “You don’t need that,” Haines says, pointing to the two-litre plastic bottle of fizzy water in Tea bags go into food waste, but check for plastic: see moralfibres.co.uk the fridge door. “We’ve got really good drinking water in this country, and if you don’t like the taste, a water filter would be better.”
Things get even worse when Haines sees what’s in the cupboard under the sink. There’s a rainbow of cleaning products, from drain unblocker to antibacterial spray to clothes whitener to bleach. “What you’ve got to worry about,” says Haines, “is that when that stuff goes down the sink, it’s going to hurt fish and aquatic life.”
She doesn’t use any of this stuff, and mostly relies on natural products. Do they work though? Our kitchen surface has a rust-coloured ring that was created when a damp pot of herbal tea was left there for months. Haines sprinkles bicarb on it, halves a lemon, squeezes the juice over the stain, and lets it seethe. We’ll check on it later.
She likes that our furniture is second-hand, and she likes that our roof is insulated, but then we start discussing clothes. I buy most of mine from charity shops, which Haines approves of, but some second-hand clothes are better than others. Fleeces release far more microfibres when washed than clothes made of other fabrics. The manufacture of denim requires a huge amount of water. Regrettably, I am wearing both a fleece and a pair of jeans. “Making and washing one pair of jeans uses the same CO2 as driving 69 miles,” says Haines, “and uses 9,982 litres of water.”
“Wait there,” I tell Haines, and I retrieve the bag of shame that I’d received earlier that afternoon: a shirt for work and a couple of T-shirts.
“As a rule of thumb, only buy something new if you can see yourself wearing it at least 30 times,” she says. This was true of all the items, but I will be a more reluctant shopper in future.
We talk more. On a societal level, Haines says, we need to invest in green energy, promote electric vehicles, plant more trees and ban non-recyclable packaging. On an individual level, most of this stuff comes down to simple, painless swaps, and even the putatively larger sacrifices she makes, such as eschewing flights, are hardly sacrifices at all: the fact that we can take a train to Amsterdam, Paris or Barcelona would have amazed our great-grandparents.
In fact, much of this stuff seems to boil down to doing what our greatgrandparents would have done. They made do and mended; they ate seasonally; they used natural cleaning products (the lemon and bicarb worked, by the way); they got mileage out of clothes. Living a more eco-friendly life, I realise, isn’t even new – let alone hard.