Cards on the table

A question that I ask myself quite frequently is "Just how green or sustainable am I?"

I am a lot greener than most people I know. This occasionally gives me fleeting feelings of smugness, but only when I lose site of the fact that the environmental damage being caused by worse offenders than me is still likely to screw all of us, and that even if I were in the bottom 1% of UK consumers in terms of energy usage and pollution (which I'm probably not anyway), then I'd still probably in the top 1% globally.

But anyway, just as an exercise and for benchmarking purposes I'm going to make a list of things that I and my family do (however small) that I think contibute towards making our lives green, sustainable, ethical and healthy etc. Which I'm going to put under the heading "good stuff". I'm also going to note down things that have the opposite effect - "Bad stuff" - and things that Id like to do or am planning to do - "Aspirational stuff" (and I will come back and edit this entry as I remember things to go on the lists).

If anyone feels like making suggestions for the aspirational list then go ahead. This is the sort of thing I would like to have on the forum section of inconspicuousconsumption.com when I get it going.

So, in no particular order:

Good Stuff

Buy organic milk where possible (wow - the first item on the list and I feel I should write an entire entry on it - but not now - guess this might apply to lots of succeeding entries too)
Have an allotment for growing vegetables
Have a compost bin in the garden
Use the council run recycling scheme
Mostly cook from scratch, avoiding processed and packaged foods where possible
Buy fresh produce from our local markets, which I can walk to
Buy most other groceries from local shops and supermarkets, which I also walk to
Buy many goods second hand on ebay
Donate and receive items locally on freecycle.org and recycle4free.org
We don't have a TV
Have bought sheeps wool insulating material for under our floors
Use green (hydro) electricity
Buy fair trade coffee
Buy fair trade bananas
Almost never buy chicken (definitely an entry coming up on this)
Use mailing preference service to stop junk mail
Often buy second-hand furniture from auction
Use washable nappies (mostly second-hand)
Have invested Child Trust Fund money in Britannia Building Society savings account whilst waiting for an ethical share account to come on the market
Have a "Nuclear power - No thanks" sticker on our car
Have one diesel powered, van derived car for the family and no other motor vehicle (not sure how good this is really, but it seems like a necessary practicality)
Use some energy efficient light bulbs
Are installing multifuel stoves to heat the house (burning mainly waste wood)


Bad stuff

Leave computer, radio and battery chargers on standby
Don't entirely use energy efficient light bulbs



Aspirational stuff

Would like to keep chickens