Well, I just did the WWF carbon footprint questionairre survey thing (official name, that) and apparently, I’m producing 108% of the carbon I should be for 2020…
Apparently, the areas in which I need to improve on most are…
…unsurprisingly, my household consumption of energy and my travel.
So, firstly, do I agree with this? The travel – certainly. The household – probably.
For balance, I took another survey and got the results above. There seems to be a discrepency between the two surveys – the WWF one puts us at 11.4 tonnes, whilst the second survey puts us at 8.44 tonnes. Given the UK average is apparently around 10 tonnes (according to WWF) and 14.1 tonnes (according to Carbon Independant), I would say we were somewhere in the average range for the UK population… (…but then, isn’t everyone – technically?)
I’m trying not to get too hung up on the numbers, but I have to say – I’m a little disappointed. I work really hard to reduce the impact I have, but short of moving into a city (or at the very least, a village), I can’t think of ways to reduce our travel impact further and which are within our financial reach.
At the moment we’re running a relatively new (2014), small-engined Petrol car. It’s well maintained, the tyre pressure is checked monthy and I make a conscious effort not to carry excess weight. I suppose that after summer, the number of trips to school/nursery will halve as both offspring will be in the same building at the same time, so perhaps it’s just a matter of holding on until then.
In an ideal world, I’d be able to either swap this car for an electric vehicle, or add one to our ‘fleet’ (the fleet of one car and two bicycles! Ha!), but again – finances make this a prohibitive action. The best I can do for now is to combine trips – i.e. go shopping whilst my eldest child is at their club, or visit friends whilst children are at school rather than making special trips. On the rare occassion I make a trip alone, I do walk into the town, but there’s no way I could do that with my miniature entourage – it’s over an hour’s walk, and health complications make anything more than around 30 minutes painful for my youngest. If anyone has any ideas on reducing milage when you live in a spot with minimal public transport, I would LOVE to hear them.
In regards to the household usage, heating accounts for just about all of this. We live in a 3-bedroom, detatched house in the middle of nowhere. When we moved in, I had no idea just what a difference this would make to our heating use, compared to living in a small semi-detatched bungalow and our previous terraced house… More fool me. Exterior walls are cold.
Eventually, we plan on replacing the old velux windows upstairs with newer ones (again, money) as the double glazing that’s there was installed in the late 80s so isn’t very efficient. Meanwhile, I’ve backed each of the radiators with reflective foil (I think there’s a DoNation pledge that covers this, but I can’t remember what it is) in an effort to lose less heat to the rock that surrounds us. We keep the ambient temperature to a cool 14C in the rest of the house and heat the living room with a log-burner as it’s where we sit. We wear a lot of sweaters. And woolly socks. And walk around with wheat bags stuffed about our clothing. The glazing is better downstairs, but I’d like to get curtains (again, money) which would help keep heat in.
We buy the wood for our stove from managed local woodland, and the stove doesn’t get lit until later afternoon. We boil our kettle on the top of it when it’s on – it’s not reducing our immediate emissions, but it’s at least lowering our electricity costs, I suppose.
That’s it, really.
And you know what? All of it feels like excuses. We could do X if Y… We could change X but… At this stage, I’ve done pretty much all of the ‘superficial’ things I can do. The next stages seem to need serious commitment, whether financial or otherwise.
To improve at this point we could: move to the village where school is, move to the bigger village where there is public transport, change to an electric vehicle, change our whole heating system to a more earth-friendly one, clad the house with insulation… none of it cheap, none of it easy.
It’s disheartening, because it feels a lot like I’ve plateaued, but I suppose I should take heart from the fact that we’ve managed to get this far without having to do anything drastic to make a difference. Which is actually a pretty interesting thought – at no point so far do I feel as though I’ve made a sacrifice. The actions I’ve taken to reduce our impact on this earth have either enriched our lives, saved us money, or both.
So, what is the next step for us?
Well, it will require some serious thinking. We’re currently a single-income, self-employed, EU-citizen-earner family, living in the UK, so nothing is certain at the moment. It’s not the nicest place to be, and it certainly leaves us reluctant to spend money. I think, to begin with, curtains are probably the next step…
I’ll keep you updated. ❤
Trail of Breadcrumbs 
Please don’t beat yourself up, you do so much to reduce your impact on the planet and share so many excellent ideas. 🙂 I’ve used the WWF thingy for many years and I actually think it’s very flawed. For instance, there is no credit given for growing your own vegetables (buying organic/ local is the best you can do, apparently) and the section about water usage has been removed. We have always lived in very rural areas and it is hard to tackle the transport issue, especially as public transport is so scarce or even non-existent. The local education authority once paid vast sums of money for a survey to tell me how I could make my travel to work greener; outcome – walk 2.5 miles to the nearest village, catch the post bus to the nearest town then a public bus to the village I taught in, arriving at school at 3pm to spend 15 minutes with my class before they went home! How I was supposed to get home again was anybody’s guess! It sounds like you’re doing all the right things by combining trips and the like, we have always kept a well-stocked freezer, too, to minimise the need for shopping trips. Do you have good loft insulation? Of course, it’s money again but it makes the single biggest impact on keeping you warm, the deeper the better. Any chance of picking up curtains from charity shops? I feel your Brexit pain, we were so lucky to have reached a point in our lives where we could choose to ‘drop out’ and live in a beautiful country where the values and attitudes are so right. Best thing we ever did. Keep the faith, your blog is so inspiring! 🙂
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That survey just says it all, doesn’t it? There’s so much literature about how to cut your impact in a city but when it comes to the practicalities of living rurally, there’s so little information out there.
I love reading about your post-UK adventures 🙂 It sounds like you’re in such a wonderful place! Hopefully the whole Brexit mess isn’t going to impact your ability to stay there. We now have settled status, so the next step is citizenship.
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