London joins national campaign to banish the curse of the plastic bag

 By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent

Published: 14 November 2007

 

British shops hand out a staggering 13 billion every year. But after a decision by 33 London councils yesterday, plastic bags could be soon be consigned to history, unmourned by anyone who cares about cleaning up the environment.

Eighty villages, towns and cities, including Brighton and Bath, have introduced or are considering a ban on them since shops in the Devon market town of Modbury went “plastic bag- free”. But yesterday represented the most significant move yet. The capital is now on board.

All 33 authorities in the London Councils group voted for legislation to prevent shops in the capital handing out free plastic bags. In the next fortnight Westminster Council will present a private Bill to the House of Commons which would apply to every London shop from the humblest newsagent to Harrods.

Shoppers clutching large numbers of bags in London’s West End could become a thing of the past; instead they will be asked to use sturdy reusable plastic “bags for life” or cotton or string hold-alls. London’s authorities said they needed to halt the environmental damage done by plastic bags, which use oil and landfill space and kill marine wildlife.

The ban is likely to be opposed by big retailers such as Tesco which prefer encouragement rather than coercion to change behaviour. But campaigners point to international trailblazers that have already banned the bags, places as diverse as Tasmania and Tanzania, which this year were joined by Paris and San Francisco. London would be the biggest urban centre yet to take the plunge.

Peter Robinson, director of Waste Watch, said: “We’ve seen successful action taken on carrier bags all across the world from Australia to Zanzibar, and now it’s time for London to take a lead on this issue in the UK.”

Although the London ban could take years to come into force, the groundswell of opposition to free disposable bags is unmistakable – and perhaps unstoppable. Major retailers have signed an agreement with the Government’s waste body, Wrap, to reduce the environmental impact of plastic bag use by 25 per cent by the end of next year. They are making the bags more lightweight, exploring biodegradable options, and discouraging their routine distribution.

Tesco says it has cut its use of carrier bags by 1 billion to 3 billion after a high-profile campaign to give loyalty points to shoppers reusing them. Today Sainsbury’s will announce in its financial results that it has cut plastic bag use by 10 per cent as a result of having signs at the checkouts asking shoppers to consider the environment and promoting jute and cotton bags. Marks & Spencer is to chargeshoppers 5p a plastic bag after a trial in Northern Ireland that cut the number handed out by 66 per cent.

The Government says it is monitoring the efforts in commerce, but is set against a plastic bag tax of the kind introduced five years ago in Ireland, where the number of carrier bags has fallen by 90 per cent. Officials claim there is evidence that Irish shoppers are using other types of plastic instead. The plastic revolution was started by a BBC camerawoman, Rebecca Hosking, from Modbury, after she had seen the deaths of albatross chicks that had eaten plastic. In the absence of government action, 43 traders in the town decided to start their own “plastic bag-free town” in May. The shops refused to give out free plastic bags, charging 5p for a cornstarch bag, 10p for a paper one or £1.50 for a cotton carrier.

Trade did not fall off, and the six-month experiment proved so successful that Modbury has made the change permanentand made the carrying of a plastic bag an antisocial activity.

Other towns such as Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire and Overton in Hampshire have followed suit, and the idea of going “plastic bag-free” is taking hold elsewhere, such as in Brighton, where councillors last month called on the city’s retailers to stop giving out bags.

The plastics industry insisted that such bans were environmentally harmful, arguing that re-use of plastic bags – to line bins, wrap packed lunches and scoop up dogs’ mess – made them more environmentally friendly than cotton alternatives, and that the oil used to make the HDPE (high density polyethylene) bags came from a by-product of oil.

Nonetheless, the industry says that unnecessary use of bags is a problem, and is calling on shoppers to consider whether they really need them. Peter Woodall, of the Packaging and Industrial Films Association, said: “We are losing the battle in terms of hearts and minds of the public, who now certainly believe that the plastic bag is a hazard to health and the environment and something we need to eradicate from society.”

Ms Hosking, who started the Modbury experiment, said that plastic bags were the start of a campaign against disposable consumer culture. “It’s our consumption of everything – whether it’s petrol, water or consumer goods – that is driving virtually every environmental problem on the planet and it needs to stop. We have shown that individual people can make a difference,” she said.

A local convenience, a global problem

Anyone who has seen The Graduate, one of the great movie classics, will remember vividly the single-word piece of advice that Dustin Hoffman’s confused young career-hopeful, Benjamin Braddock, receives from a well-meaning family friend: Plastics.

Asked to clarify what exactly he means, the family friend, Mr McGuire, explains: “There’s a great future in plastics.” And in 1967, when the film was made, no doubt there was.

Unfortunately, in the succeeding years, many aspects of what then seemed to be those oh-so-convenient, revolutionary, synthetic materials have come to appear not a blessing but a curse – and plastic bags are high on the list.

The trouble with them is that they have the vices of their virtues. They are incredibly cheap and light, and so are produced in astronomical, scarcely credible, numbers; and remarkably tough for their lightness, they are incredibly persistent in the environment once we have finished with them.

Nobody knows exactly how many plastic bags are consumed annually worldwide, but a good estimate is between 500 billion and 1,000 billion, which comes out at more than a million a minute – and then they’re all thrown away. But as they do not biodegrade, huge numbers don’t disappear. They have become the most ubiquitous item of litter. They are the icons of the throwaway society.

In parts of Africa, there are so many blowing through the bush that a cottage industry has sprung up in harvesting windblown bags and using them to weave hats, or even more bags.

But in some parts of the environment, they represent a lethal threat to wildlife, in particular in the oceans. According to the British Antarctic Survey, they have spread from Spitzbergen north of the Arctic Circle to the Falkland Islands at the other end of the globe.

When floating they can resemble jellyfish, and so are often mistakenly eaten by sea turtles and other marine mammals and birds, with fatal results.

No one denies plastic bags are satisfyingly convenient. But as Billy Joel sang, you pay for your satisfaction somewhere along the line.

Michael McCarthy

Source: The Independent.

Have you got green fatigue?

You recycle and buy local – but the earth’s still warming and the ice cap’s still melting. If you’re starting to feel apathy creeping in, you’re not the only one. Hugh Wilson reports

Published: 20 September 2007

Recent environmental messages have made such an impact on a friend of mine that, a couple of weeks ago, he broke a four-year prohibition and walked back into Burger King. “Intensive beef production, clone town Britain, just so much blah,” he said, by way of explanation. “Nobody else really seems to be doing much about it, so why should I bother?”

My friend is the embodiment of one of the great fears of the environmental lobby. Fifteen years ago, the term “compassion fatigue” indicated a general disillusionment with fund-raising concerts and famine appeals. The cause was too hopeless, governments too apathetic, and individuals too impotent. Slowly, and for similar reasons, the term “green fatigue” has started to creep into the dinner-party conversations of the composting classes.

And, if anything, with more reason. Environmental campaigners worry that individuals see their actions as largely irrelevant when set against the enormity of global climate change. While famine appeals parade a simple, striking message – send a tenner, save a child – no such easy cause and effect exists for global warming. By contrast, the solutions to climate change seem hugely complex and controversial.

“The problems we face are of a magnitude no one has seen in at least two generations,” says Alex Steffen, the executive editor of WorldChanging, a website and book that promote innovative solutions for sustainable living. “The scale of the actions people are being told to take by green consumerism groups and businesses, on the other hand, are so small as to seem meaningless. I think that more and more people see this widening gulf and lose hope.”

And if we’re not all losing hope just yet, many of us are becoming increasingly cynical. To campaigners, that’s not surprising. As Steffen suggests, businesses have turned environmentalism into a marketing strategy. A new term, “green-washing”, describes companies that paint a superficial green gloss on conventional business practices. When firms such as BP and Wal-Mart parade their environmentally friendly credentials, scepticism is not only inevitable, says Steffen, it’s “a necessary antidote”.

At least the green lobby can count on celebrities to spread the message. Unfortunately, the message too often seems to be, “do as I say, not as I do”. Celebrity is an intrinsically unsustainable condition. The reaction to the Live Earth concerts – which prompted as much debate on the carbon footprint of the A-listers who’d been chauffeured in for the occasion as the campaign they were there to endorse – showed the insidious spread of green fatigue.

It could have been worse. In the States, Sheryl Crow’s “Stop Global Warming College Tour” was panned for stipulating parking for three tractor-trailers, four buses and six cars. John Travolta recently urged the British public to “do their bit” to combat global warming after flying in on his private Boeing 707, and got trounced in the press for his efforts. None of this is likely to keep the public on side in the long run – and countering climate change is likely to be a very long run indeed.

Even the pronouncements of more committed celebrities can seem, well, a little misjudged. A new book, edited by the socialite and former model Sheherazade Goldsmith, the wife of the Ecologist editor Zac, advises concerned greens to keep geese and make their own goat’s cheese. As my sceptical friend said: “The goose can stay on the balcony, but I doubt you’d call it free-range.”

Of course, many celebrities and businesses now offset their carbon emissions by paying for trees to be planted in sustainable forests or investments made in green energy projects. But “magic bullet” solutions to climate change are quickly losing their sheen. Recent investigations – including a widely trailed Dispatches programme on Channel 4 – question the effectiveness of carbon offsetting and suggest that it might even be counterproductive.

Some environmentalists worry that carbon offsetting promotes the idea that if you throw a few quid at the problem you can carry on as normal. According to Michael R Solomon, the author of Consumer Behaviour: Buying, Having and Being: “Consumers are always going to gravitate toward a more parsimonious solution that requires less behavioural change. We know that new products or ideas are more likely to be adopted if they don’t require us to alter our routines very much.”

Unfortunately, most environmentalists agree that altering our routines quite fundamentally is the only real way to save the planet. Meanwhile, another “magic bullet” solution – and one that would also allow many of us to carry on pretty much as normal – is coming in for unexpected criticism: a recent study has suggested that any widespread uptake of biofuels in Europe could decimate Asian rainforests.

What all this adds up to, experts fear, is a recipe for disillusionment and – eventually – disengagement. Psychologically, we’re primed to walk away from problems that are too complex to understand and too difficult to solve, and we’ll break into a run if we think cynical marketers and self-publicising celebrities are jumping on a green bandwagon. And green campaigners who think a deluge of apocalyptic information will cut through our cynicism are probably mistaken.

“In an information-filled world, people screen heavily what new information they let in, and I suspect that the run-of-the-mill global-warming story is just not crossing the threshold,” says the climate scientist Dr Susanne Moser, the co-author of Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change. By run-of-the-mill, she means those all-too-familiar stories about melting ice shelves or endangered species. “Thinking about a global, complex, challenging, and potentially very dangerous and disastrous thing and not knowing what to do about it makes us go numb or into denial.”

The antidote to numbness and denial is a sense of progress, of things getting better. But in the fight against climate change, progress is hard to come by. Moser uses the analogy of a diet. How long would you stay on a diet that demanded stringent effort over a prolonged period and promised only that that your weight gain might slow down a bit? Let’s face it, it wouldn’t make the cover of Grazia.

She also admits that “we have terribly failed our audience” by focusing on apocalyptic scenarios and complex science. Instead, one key factor in keeping people enthused in the fight against climate change will be local, collective action, she says.

“Why do people go to Alcoholics Anonymous, or to Weight Watchers? Because in a group of like-minded people they have the support, accountability, peer pressure and the shared experience of others to help make the change. They also have opportunities to come together, check on progress, and get support around setbacks. That’s what we need for climate change – to recover from our fuel addiction.”

Progress on a small and local scale – such as saving a beloved local shop, voting in a councillor who will push green issues, or increasing local recycling rates – and even a desire to keep up with the Joneses (“if everybody’s ditching the gas-guzzler, I’ll do it, too”) are far more effective motivators than media-inspired guilt and vague fears of an uncertain future, she adds.

Alex Steffen also believes in the need for a local, community focus. But he says that we need to be honest about the scale of the changes that have to be made, and to counter green fatigue by imbuing the fight against climate change with an almost heroic spirit.

“I don’t think we need to sugar-coat the challenges we face,” he says. “We just need to ask people to rise to their real potential, and see that this is our moment for greatness. If we create a sustainable future for everyone, it will be an accomplishment as great as winning the Second World War.

“Many environmentalists assume people won’t do anything more than small steps, and hope those small steps will build the political will for more substantive changes. But history has shown a thousand times that “regular” people are capable of extraordinary courage, dedication and ingenuity when asked to answer the call. It’s time we put out that call, rather than another marketing pitch.”

The small actions that can make a big difference

* You’ve heard it before, but changing to energy-efficient light bulbs really can make a difference. Lighting uses 20 per cent of the world’s electricity, the equivalent of burning 600,000 tons of coal a day. Phasing out old bulbs would avoid the release of 700 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year.

* Shop local. If your food shopping amounts to £100 a week, that’s £5,200 a year that could be going into the pocket of a local butcher, grocer and baker, rather than the supermarket till. Imagine if 100 people in your area had the same idea.

* Is recycling really worth it? Yes. Recycling one glass jar saves enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for four hours. Glass can be reused an infinite number of times. Think of all the jars recycled in your street in a year.

* Recycling a ton of paper saves 17 trees and 7,000 gallons of water.

* Turning your thermostat down by two degrees can save 2,000 pounds of carbon every year. Just imagine if everyone in your family and everyone in your office did it.

From: The Independent.

When bivalves ruled the world

Paleobiologist studies how elevated

C02 affected ancient marine life

 

Before the worst mass extinction of life in Earth’s history – 252 million years ago – ocean life was diverse and clam-like organisms called brachiopods dominated. After the calamity, when little else existed, a different kind of clam-like organism, called a bivalve, took over.

What can the separate fates of these two invertebrates tell scientists about surviving an extinction event”

A lot, says UWM paleoecologist Margaret Fraiser. Her research into this particular issue not only answers the question; it also supports a relatively new theory for the cause of the massive extinctions that occurred as the Permian period ended and the Triassic period began: toxic oceans created by too much atmospheric carbon dioxide (C02).

The theory is important because it could help scientists predict what would happen in the oceans during a modern “C02 event.” And it could give them an idea of what recovery time would be.

Studying the recovering ecology is equally significant, says Fraiser. The evolution of surviving species in the aftermath of the mass extinction set the stage for dinosaurs to evolve later in the Triassic.

From air to water Fossil records suggest that trauma in the oceans actually began in the air.

“Estimates of the C02 in the atmosphere then were between six and 10 times greater than they are today,” says Fraiser, an assistant professor of geosciences. It makes sense, she says. The largest continuous volcanic eruption on Earth – known as the “Siberian Traps” – had been pumping out C02 for about a million years prior to the Permian-Triassic mass extinction.

The time scale shows the expanse of time between the Permian-Triassic mass extinction and the less severe mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. Click here for more information.

The Permian-Triassic extinction wiped out 70 percent of life on land and close to 95 percent in the ocean – nearly everything except for bivalves and a fewer number of gastropods (snails).

C02 is a greenhouse gas that influences global temperatures. But, says Fraiser, according to the fossil record, high levels of C02 and the correspondingly low levels of oxygen do much more than that.

The hypothesis unfolds like this: High C02 levels would have increased temperatures, resulting in global warming on a large scale. With no cold water at the poles, ocean circulation would have stagnated. The oceans would have become low in oxygen, killing off life in deeper waters where there was no opportunity for water to mix with the little oxygen in the atmosphere.

More carbon dioxide would have been created as life forms died and microbes broke them down, which also would have created poisonous hydrogen sulfide. The oceans would have become an inhabitable chemical cocktail.

Follow the CO2 In fact, there have been many CO2 events in geologic time, and they’ve literally left their mark.

“You can see where the rock turned dark,” says Fraiser, pointing out different-colored layers in a fossil samples from the period. “That is an indicator of low oxygen at the time. These are from sites that were underwater at the beginning of the Triassic period.”

Fraiser, who has just finished her first year at UWM, is one of several new faculty in geosciences and its emerging paleobiology program.

She has collected fossil samples of the marine survivors from the period in what today are China, Japan, Italy and the western United States. The similarities of the fossils from all these locations have been surprising.

“It is unexpected to see that,” says Fraiser. “It appears that these bivalves and gastropods were the only survivors worldwide.”

They had all the right characteristics to tolerate the lack of oxygen, she says. They were tiny, shallow-water dwellers, with a high metabolism and flat shape that allowed them to spread out to extract more of the limited oxygen when feeding.

Toxic conditions also inhibited marine life from producing a shell. Size suddenly mattered for mollusks, and only the very small survived, eroding the balance of the marine food chain.

Ultra-slow rebound As she sorts through the rock record from just after the Permian-Triassic extinction, Fraiser also has unearthed evidence that explains why it took so long for life to recover. The answer appears to be more of the same: C02 levels remained high long after the initial die-off.

“After other extinction events on Earth, life bounced back within 100,000 to a million years,” she says. “But with the Permian-Triassic extinction, we don’t see a recovery for 5 million years. There is very low ecological complexity and diversity for all of that time.”

Another intriguing aspect of this interval in Earth’s history, says Fraiser, is that, according to the rock record from the Triassic, it was bounded by two C02 events.

The first was the disappearance of coral reefs. “That gap sounded the alarm,” she says. “That’s what indicated that C02 levels were elevated.”

On the back end, large communities of bivalves prevailed in such large numbers that they formed their own reefs.

Fraiser’s charting of the C02 “domino effect” on Early Triassic marine life is valuable as scientists study climate change today, says UWM Geology Professor John Isbell.

“The Earth’s system doesn’t care where the C02 comes from,” Isbell says. “It’s going to respond the same way.”

From Site: http://www.eurekalert.org/

 

Journey to Forever

 The Project

Journey to Forever is a pioneering expedition by a small, mobile NGO (Non-Government Organization) involved in environment and rural development work, starting from Hong Kong and travelling 40,000 kilometres through 26 countries in Asia and Africa to Cape Town, South Africa.

Our route will take us away from the cities and populated districts to remote and inaccessible areas (usually also the least developed and poorest areas), where we’ll be studying and reporting on environmental conditions and working for local NGOs on rural development projects in local communities.

The focus will be on trees, soil and water, sustainable farming, sustainable technology, and family nutrition.

The aim is to help people fight poverty and hunger, and to help sustain the environment we all must share.

TO VISIT THE SITE: http://journeytoforever.org/

Ten readers’ ways to cut your carbon footprint

We’ve brought you ten ways to cut your carbon footprint at home and ten ways to cut your carbon footprint at work, now we feature ten ideas from readers of The Independent to help you lead a greener, cleaner, less polluting and less carbon-heavy lifestyle

Published: 09 August 2007

 

Reduce your carbon footprint by taking your holidays in the UK

1 Buy local produce

There are many reasons for buying local. Often it’s just nice to know where your food comes from, but most of the time there’s a reduction in your carbon footprint too. This is because, in a world of globalised food production, most food travels a long distance, releasing CO2 all the way.

One estimate concluded that feeding each of us for a year requires transporting the equivalent of a 12-tonne container load of food for more than a 100km. The trucks involved emit 170kg of CO2 in Britain and another 150kg abroad. A further 30kg comes from air-freighting your perishables, such as vegetables, fruit and fish. Organic food, incidentally, is no better. Twice as much organic food is imported as domestically produced, or as much as three quarters by some estimates.

Most of these transport emissions can be eliminated by buying local produce. Supermarkets are increasingly good at labelling this clearly, and farmers’ markets usually sell nothing else. There are more than 500 farmers’ markets in the UK, and more are starting up all the time. Check where your nearest is by going to www.farmersmarkets.net.

To be doubly sure of having a low carbon footprint, it’s a good idea to make a point of buying produce when it’s in season. That way, you avoid the CO2 emissions from heating greenhouses, which can sometimes be as great as air-freighting from foreign lands. For a guide to what’s in season when, see www.thefoody.com/basic.

2 Reduce your meat consumption

The carbon footprint from producing animal protein is typically eight times greater than that from vegetable protein. Animals are not very efficient protein converters and a lot of energy is lost along the food chain. Much depends on how the animals are fed. Those raised on natural pastures have CO2 emissions 50 per cent less than those raised on concentrated feed grown using artificial fertilisers.

Free-range is best. That’s partly why British lamb, for instance, has a bigger carbon footprint than New Zealand lamb, even when the latter has been shipped halfway across the world. You may think that all lamb is free-range, but British lambs are given fodder, rather than eating pasture, for some of the year. The slaughtering rules and supermarket requirements also mean that British lamb is often trucked all over the country, adding to its carbon footprint.

In addition, farm animals directly produce another potent greenhouse gas. The guts of ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats, etc) generate methane while digesting food. Cattle belch and fart a lot and methane is also generated in slurry tanks. All told, every kilogram of beef raised in a feedlot can be responsible for more than 30kg of greenhouse gases.

So, reducing your meat consumption is good for your carbon footprint. And cutting out beef is best of all. But a word of warning: this good work could easily be undone if you increase your dairy produce intake to compensate. The reason: dairy cows typically produce twice as much methane as beef cattle. That’s why you should manage your dairy intake, too, if you want to reduce the carbon footprint of the food you eat.

3 Avoid over-packaged goods

We all complain about excessive food packaging, but supermarkets say we are reluctant to buy loose food. We should get serious about this, however. One estimate is that the manufacture of packaging for British food produces 10 million tonnes of CO2 in Britain each year, or 170kg for each one of us.

Some retailers claim that extra packaging reduces damage to food – and so wastage – during transportation, but a lot of packaging has more to do with presentation than anything else. And if all that packaging is really necessary for safe transportation, then that’s another reason to buy local produce, which generally has the least packaging.

If we must have packaging, does it matter what kind? Plastic is usually bad news, as it takes more energy to produce than cardboard. And whereas most cardboard can be recycled, many types of plastic can’t. Aluminium cans have the biggest carbon footprint of any form of packaging because it takes a large amount of energy to smelt the metal. This means that draught beer is best and bottles are better than cans. If you do buy a can, make absolutely sure that it’s recycled.

Some people are concerned about waste being exported for recycling, but the evidence is that, whether in Beijing or Birmingham, there can often be a good use for our rubbish, so don’t be put off. Even so, it’s better to avoid packaging in the first place.

4 Join a car pool or club

Every day, there are 10 million empty seats in cars on our roads. Sharing your car journey to work could save you hundreds of pounds a year, as well as easing traffic congestion, saving wear and tear on your car and cutting your carbon footprint. Put four people in a car and commuting can become as low carbon as taking the bus. You can, of course, car share informally with work colleagues, but there are also car-sharing websites to match you up with fellow commuters.

Do you commute to work by public transport but keep a car for occasional weekend trips? If so, think about joining a car club, where you just pay for a car when you need one. To work well, car clubs require a critical mass of members because you don’t want to have to travel far to pick up the car. So far, they’ve made most progress in London, encouraged by the big population, high parking charges and large number of people who generally use public transport and only need a car occasionally. Other cities across the country, including Brighton and Southampton, have similar schemes.

5 Cut down on junk mail

Your mailbox is clogging up with CO2 every day. The average adult gets 19kg of junk mail a year, with a carbon footprint from its manufacture and distribution that’s several times greater. The Royal Mail will stop delivering unaddressed junk mail if you e-mail it at optout@ royalmail.com. To ask not to receive the junk mail with your name and address on, sign up with the Mailing Preference Service at www.mpsonline.org.uk.

Fearful of losing profitable business because of a green-minded backlash against junk mail, the Royal Mail has announced a responsible mail service. This will offset the CO2 emissions from the paper manufacture, printing and transportation of your mail. Don’t let this deter you from stopping your junk mail, though. As every climate activist will tell you, offsetting emissions is very much second best to preventing emissions in the first place.

6 Reuse and refuse plastic bags

We get through 17 billion plastic bags a year, which is approaching one each every day. Reduce this plastic trail by taking plastic or reusable bags shopping with you and asking staff not to give you a bag when you pay. This is becoming a worldwide movement. It started in small communities, where retailers agreed not to hand plastic bags out any more, but is growing fast. Later this year, San Francisco will become the largest US city to date to ban the plastic bag.

The supermarkets see this as a sales opportunity, of course. They want to sell us reusable, “bag for life” bags. This is fine, but all bags are reusable, unless they break, and your home is probably already full of them, so start by reusing those. And here’s another use for plastic bags: use them to line your rubbish bins at home.

7 Holiday in the UK

Maybe, after this year’s wet summer, this isn’t the best time to mention it but Britain is one of the world’s top holiday destinations. People cross the globe to sample our delights, so why miss out on a good thing? Check out our back yard and cut your carbon footprint into the bargain.

Holidays are among our biggest sources of CO2 emissions and the main element is the flight. An economy return flight from the UK to Florida or New York creates emissions equivalent to a year’s car use. And a return flight to Lanzarote emits as much as a power station generating your share of domestic electricity for a year. For millions of us, our carbon footprint from flying is bigger than for everything else we do and buy.

Unlike most other parts of our lives, there are no off-the-shelf ways of being a greener flyer. For many of us, the single biggest step we can take to cut our carbon footprint is to stop flying and start holidaying closer to home.

If you don’t want to holiday in the UK, restrict yourself to Europe and go by train or ferry rather than plane. It is slower, and probably more expensive, but you can make the journey part of the holiday. Through the Alps, down the Rhine, across the lagoon into Venice: all are great journeys. You’ll wonder why you ever flew.

8 Be eco when staying in hotels

We’ve all seen the signs in hotel rooms asking us to reuse the towels. We wouldn’t change our towel at home every day, so why do it on holiday? And just because you’re not paying directly for the electricity, don’t leave the lights on. Do the energy-saving things you would do at home. Take a shower not a bath, don’t use or remove all the (probably imported) soaps and lotions, don’t leave the TV on standby, don’t have the air conditioning on all the time and always turn it off when you leave the room. If your room’s only a couple of floors up, take the stairs rather than the lift – you know you need the exercise.

Try and find a hotel that plausibly advertises its green credentials. Look out for hotels belonging to the Green Tourism Business Scheme or with the Energy Star rating, but don’t be too seduced by eco chic. The good news is that the hotels with the smallest carbon footprint are, often, the simplest and cheapest.

Research the public transport system where you’re going beforehand (many publish their routes and timetables online) and pick a hotel close to a station or bus route, so you aren’t dependent on taxis and hire cars.

9 Don’t bin things: reuse, Freecycle and buy second-hand

The car may not be green, but the car boot sale certainly is. And don’t just sell your stuff there, buy as well. Green chic comes cheap and cheerful and from the school playground on a Saturday morning.

The green consumer also goes to jumble sales, buys used books, searches out bargains in antiques shops and checks out charity shops for clothes and other goodies: it’s all had one life already, so it’s carbon neutral. By keeping old products in circulation, you’re preventing them from being dumped or put in landfill and preventing their carbon from leaking back into the atmosphere.

While your friends are bargaining away on eBay, why not go one step further and check out the Freecycle network? It’s dedicated to giving used things away. Freecycle started in the US, but there are local groups all over Britain now, as you will quickly find at www.freecycle.org.

10 Keep your clothing footprint small

A low-carbon wardrobe is also a small wardrobe. Buy second-hand whenever possible and when you buy new, ensure they’re things you really like and will wear for years. Fast fashion is bad for your carbon footprint. And bear in mind that the majority of your clothing footprint probably comes not from the purchase but from keeping it clean.

Here’s the equation for a cotton T-shirt. Growing the cotton generates about 1kg of CO2, mostly from manufacturing the fertilisers and pesticides used and from pumping the 30 or so bathtubs of water needed for irrigation. Turning that cotton into a shirt and transporting it to a store near you generates around another 2kg. However, you’ll use around 4kg washing and tumble drying it a typical 25 times. Denim jeans and cotton knickers come out much the same.

Other fibres, such as viscose and polyester, take more energy to make than cotton but use less subsequently because they’re often washed at lower temperatures and dry more easily.

To minimise your clothing footprint, you should wash at a lower temperature than it says on the label (even Marks & Spencer now recommends this) and always put a full load in the machine. Mothball that tumble drier because it’s one of your home’s biggest energy guzzlers. Invest instead in a washing line and an indoor clothes dryer. And forget about ironing, unless it’s essential.

Source: http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2846571.ece