Loppy’s Green Tips for Everyone (but especially those on a tight budget!)

When Brigit describes someone as ‘green’, you know they are greener than green! I was lucky enough to meet Loppy at the Big Green Gathering a couple of years ago, and she truly is an inspirational person…as well as a really lovely one! Ed.

People seem to think you have to be a middle class person with plenty of money to live a sustainable lifestyle. This is really not true. I live in the suburbs of a city in Wales, in a council house, on my pension. In this article there may be stuff I have taken from other people, but if it’s wise it should be passed on, plus I can’t always remember where it originated!

Sustainable practices:

• do not damage the environment
• are equitable, ie fair to everybody and everything
• are economically viable, for either a country or an individual, or have a good payback for the investment
• should suit local circumstances - there is no point in written instructions in areas where most don’t read, or water pumps only men can use in areas where women fetch all the water.

If you want to live a more sustainable life, it is useful to work out your ecological and/or carbon footprint. The ecological footprint is a measure of how much planet surface it takes to support your lifestyle. If most people lived like the average Welsh person is currently living we would need three planets. Humans consuming so much impacts on the poor in other countries, who suffer from droughts and floods, despite using about 241 times less energy than we do. You can search the internet for different calculators for your ecological footprint, although the World Wide Fund for Nature do a good one: see http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/.

Our carbon footprint is a measure of how much carbon our individual lifestyle is responsible for producing. Mark Lynas has written a useful little carbon calculator book (available to buy through the link at the bottom of the article), or you can find a multitude of different carbon calculators on the internet, though they all have some limitations.

Travel

A big part of a person’s carbon footprint is travel and the worst thing you can do is to fly. You would have to go without heating, cooking, lighting and all forms of motorised transport for years to pay back the carbon used on a flight. I mostly use train and bus. I went on holiday to Budapest last year by coach and the Channel Tunnel. I couldn’t afford to go to Hungary by train so the coach was a compromise. Which is a good point - if you are broke you have to juggle and do the greenest thing you can afford to do. In London, for example, people really don’t need a car: the Oyster card is brilliant and really cheap, and you can use it on buses, tube and some trains! Of course the cheapest way to travel is by walking: we would all be much more healthy if we walked more! Or cycled!

In the home

Being in a council property I can’t invest in solar water heating to save energy, but I save what I can in carbon and money by little ruses:

• My electric kettle has a concealed element and a measuring gauge, so I only boil as much as I need for my tea.
• All my bulbs are either energy saving bulbs or LEDs. LEDs use even less power than energy savers. I don’t find them a warm enough light for the living room, but I have them in the halls, bathroom and kitchen. They last a very long time apparently. I have an excellent LED reading light from Argos. The bulbs are expensive but the efficiency and longevity mean that you save on energy for years.
• I get my electric from Good Energy because all their electric comes from renewables.
• My friends, in their Salisbury council house, have put solar electric panels on their shed and they have got all their lights, TV, chargers and laptop running off a 12 volt battery in the living room from deep cycle batteries that the panels charge. The batteries were found at the dump! (Editor’s note: What a brilliant idea for those of us in rented accommodation!)
• But the best, most energy saving thing you can do is to have really good insulation in your loft and double glazing, because then the warmth doesn’t escape from your house and you don’t have to have so much heating.
• I am stuck with gas central heating in my rented home but I put tinfoil behind radiators to reflect heat back into the room.
• I turn off the oven five or ten minutes earlier than the recipe says as it still is hot enough to finish cooking the food.
• Using steamers to cook all your veg on on one ring saves gas, and so does keeping lids on. Pressure cookers and microwaves help too.
• Have thick lined curtains and draw them as soon as it gets dark to keep the warmth in.
• Turn the heating down and put thermals and a jumper on.
• Always put much more than just one thing in the oven - cook tomorrow’s dinner as well!
• Don’t leave electrical equipment on standby and don’t leave things like phone chargers on - they all drain energy and cost you money.
• Use rechargeable batteries, because they save energy and stop all the toxic waste of discarded batteries.
• Instead of buying new electric goods, buy hand powered second-hand ones like mincers - they only use human power!
• And you don’t need a blooming electric tumble drier. There is a good, free solar drier you can use; it’s called a washing line!
• If you need a new appliance like a washing machine, check out how much energy and water it costs to run. Go for A or A+ rated goods because they will save money by using less energy.

There is so much more I could write, about water use, food, chemicals and recycling but there is not enough room in the article!

Most importantly though, even if, like me, you are one of the poorer people in the UK, we are not poor compared to how life was in the 1950s. And compared to most people in the world we are rich. I think we should all give a little bit of time and money to something we believe in. £1 a month to Campaign Against Climate Change would help them so much. Or £4 a month to something like an AIDS charity in Africa. Or buy a Big Issue every month. My friends work as volunteers on a charity stall for Romanian orphans every week - they help people and get cheap second-hand items that they need!

Work, to me, should be to make things better and to survive, not just to get more money for things we don’t need. Employment can waste your life so if you would be happier working part time, do it; cut down on non-essentials and then enjoy the spare time to live a life! Go and walk in the woods! Make some marmalade! Enjoy life!

Loppy Garrard

Bluebell woods (c) Jilly Graham 2009

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