THREE GREEN EXPERTS ON HOW TO RUN AN ECO-FRIENDLY HOME
THE TECH-FREE CABIN-DWELLER MARK BOYLE, 40
The idea of an eco-home means different things to different people. For me it’s a roundwood, straw bale cabin, which I built by hand, on the smallholding where I live without running water, gas, electricity or any of the things it powers: no internet, phone, washing machine or light bulb.
This suits my personality: I like the simplicity, the closeness to nature, the slowness, even the hard realities of it. But that’s me. For other people, an eco-home looks entirely different. With so much hot air about carbon emissions, most talk is about designing fossil fuel usage out of our homes. This is no bad thing – what’s good for the golden eagle is also good for your bank balance.
There are all sorts of cost-efficient ways to switch to cleaner, more energyefficient homes, and people better placed than me to explain how best to do it. But instead of powering our screens and gadgets with so-called green energy, I say get rid of them altogether. They distract us from the here and now, from the people we care about and the places we live. After all, we can’t hope to save the world if we don’t even remember to savour the world.
The Way Home: Tales from a Life without Technology is published by Oneworld
THE CONSCIENTIOUS REDEVELOPER ROSS LAMMAS, 57
A few years ago, we bought an old farmhouse that was completely wrecked. We rebuilt it in a completely eco-friendly way, using natural insulation, energy
efficient glazing, heated by a ground-source heat pump and built with low embodied energy materials such as timber, rather than carbon-heavy bricks and mortar. It’s cheaper to run than a terraced house.
During the project, I was frustrated by the lack of information on the environmental friendliness of electrical goods, so in 2006, a year after we finished the farmhouse, I developed sust-it.net. It’s an energy-efficiency comparison site for electrical products, vehicles and energy providers.
My partner, Issi, is also very interested in sustainability. We’re not vegan and we sometimes fly, but generally we try to cut back. Together we run greenchoices.org, which is a website that provides consumer information on areas such as domestic life, holidays and shopping. The most important thing is reducing our consumption.
THE SUSTAINABILITY-LOVING ECO-BLOGGER WENDY GRAHAM, 37
When I was a child, I saw things like acid rain on the news, and it made a real impression on me. I’ve always been interested in helping the environment, but when I started looking for ecologically minded blogs a few years ago, I found that many of them were perpetuating outdated ideas such as tie-dyeing.
I wanted something more relatable, something that would show people easy ways of living sustainably. So I made moralfibres.co. uk, which does just that. Recently, I’ve written about plastic-free instant coffee (it’s surprisingly difficult to find), how to compost in a flat, and how to potty-train in an eco-friendly way.
I started the blog in 2013. Since then there’s been a lot more awareness in the media of the importance of living in an environmentally friendly way, and I’ve now got lots of engaged readers. It’s infuriating to find out how much plastic there is in things we routinely use, but it’s very satisfying to have an impact.