First things first here - I am not expecting everyone here to have all the latest inventions for saving energy, composting your waste and producing all your own food and energy!
This article is just focusing on energy to get the ball rolling, and will hopefully offer you tips and ideas for those little steps that can help you save money and help the environment save itself! Don’t forget, that the planet can do just fine with whatever we throw at it and will still be here long after we have gone and taken all the other plants and animals with us - it will never just disappear - it will just adapt. Think of the primordial soup.
What we are trying to do is save the human race. We need a planet where the human race can survive, not just an actual planet. Without certain plants and animals, humans will just fade away. Without certain weather and environmental factors, humans will not be able to survive.
I know it all sounds a bit dramatic, but science has told us that this is where we are heading, we are destroying the very things we need to survive as we are now.
Your efforts can slow this down, between us we can help reduce our impact on the environment and make the world look a bit less bleak for our children and their children.
Electricity.
Electricity is one of the easiest energy source to save money on. I know that it is really annoying to lean over the back of the PC or the television to switch everything off, but it all helps.
Valuable resources are used to create the energy you are wasting every time you go away for the weekend and leave appliances in a state where they are drawing electricity - and of course it is costing you money as well. The energy suppliers don’t give you free electricity to keep the light on you washing machine saying ‘READY’.
Just because you are not actually using an appliance, it does’t mean it is not using electricity.
Water.
Water is a bit trickier as some people have their certain bathroom routines, and I am the first one to opt for a deep bath, but you are still allowing your wages to flush down the toilet every time you do a full flush for a tiny wee, or leave the tap running for whatever reason (cleaning teeth/rinsing plates or veg/having just filled up the kettle but going over an plugging it it before turning off the water!). These are just little things but they cost you money.
Gas.
Gas is very wasteful. Try to avoid all appliances (apart from central heating) that use gas because it just runs up the bills. I once watched the gas meter when I switched on my gas fire - and rest assured I will never use another in my home - go look at yours!. I have one tip for saving gas, and that is don’t use it!
If you are using a gas fire - and creating gas does give off less carbon than the creation of electricity - then make sure that the room it is in is well insulated to retain as much of the warmth as possible (curtains pulled/ door closed/ double glazing/ etc). That way, whatever heat it gives you is controlled and not wasted.
Appliances.
And it’s not just the energy used to run the appliances that is a concern - what about the energy and resources used to make them in the first place?
Now I know that there are now more energy-efficient products on the market, and you should seriously consider buying these when you next need to buy an appliance, but don’t buy one if your old one is still working well.
The reason? What are you going to do with the old one? If you are going to throw it away - that is a complete waste of resources. The old one will end up discarded on a skip, wasting all the valuable metals and minerals that went into creating it. By all means give it to a breaker who will be able to reclaim any parts that are still useful and recycle them into other machines.
But you are thinking that you will give it to a charity or another person - and this is the better option, but either way, the machine will still be being used by someone. It is still going to be using the same amount of energy whoever has it, but you would have spent money (and used further resources) to buy your new one as well.
And I’m sure that if some mathematician could work out the extra energy you save with your new appliance and compare it to the energy cost of making your new appliance, transporting your new appliance, running your new appliance and the running costs of someone else still using your old appliance - it won’t be a saving.
The message I am trying to pass across here, is that jumping on the band-wagon of eco friendly living before you have eased yourself into the whole ‘circle of eco’ could acutally do you more harm than good. You may have spent a lot of money or invested a lot of time in a new eco-friendly theory or appliance - possibly having family rows about it all, only to find out from someone else that you could have made a different decision in the first place.
Take your time.
Don’t rush into this whole style of living until you have read up on the issues or have spoken to friends, and have drawn the line about your limits. Making small, effective changes that suit your lifestyle will last longer and give you more satisfaction than some of the bigger changes that you cannot keep up with and end up giving up on.
For example, if you can easily remember to reuse your shopping bags, do that. If you don’t have a garden or an allotment it would be pointless to collect your waste food for composting. If you can easily buy (recycled and/or charity) birthday cards on plain paper with plain envelopes then do so. If you have 2 or more children however, you probably shouldn’t try to swap your car for bicycles!
Be reasonable to yourself and you will achieve more - and feel better about it too.
