Colwall Greener

The lists below are the things you can personally do in your life style that will make a difference. They are generally listed with the biggest benefit from the smallest investment at the top of the list for each section. 

In ITALICS items are free, low cost or have grants available & rapid pay back. They all reduce your cost of living are healthy for you, your community and the planet. 

Underlined the eighteen easy to do, MUST DO’s in year one of your personal programme they are all no or low cost.

Home - saving power & fuel 

Change to a green electricity supplier.Loft

Insulation, increase to 30cms/12ins – grants/subsidies available

Insulate Hot Water Tank

Reduce room thermostat by 1 to 2 degrees (1 degree = 10% saving)

Reduce hot water temperature

Switch off equipment with stand by or power pack/transformers at wall socket or gang socket. (Intelligent Plugs or Bye Bye Stand By devices make this easy)

Change to Low Energy Light Bulbs

Fill kettle with the amount of water you need

Avoid using tumble dryer whenever possible (use line, clothes horse or radiator rails)

Fit Radiator thermostats, only heat the rooms you use

Put lids on saucepans, turn down power once boiling, pressure cookers are most efficient, use burner size that matches the pan size.

Cavity Wall insulation - grants/subsidies available

Draught Excluder to windows and doors Defrost fridge/freezer regularly

Buy “A” rated appliances

Replace Boiler with Condensing Boiler

Double glazing or secondary glazing

Porches to outside doors

Fit Solar Water Heating Panels

Dry Lining or external insulation of solid wallsInstall heat pumps (air or ground source)

Fit PV cells to generate electricity or wind generator 

Home – saving water 

Fit Dual Flush Toilets or Hippos to Cisterns

Shower rather than bath (this also saves on fuel to heat the water)

Wait for a full load in the dishwasher & washing machine before washing (this also saves on fuel to heat the water), wash at lower temperatures

Use a bowl in the kitchen sink

Turn off tap when tooth brushing

Use rain water butts for you gardening watering

Fit a water meter 

Savings, Investments and Pensions 

Be an active consumer of these services, ensure your money is being invested in products, processes and services that are good for people and the planet  

Home – reducing waste 

Don’t throw it away if you can give it away e.g., recycle for reuse any unwanted items to Charity Shops, Car boot Sales, Jumble Sales or www.freecycle.org 

Compost &/or use a wormery or green cone for all kitchen waste

Separate waste as suggested by local council for their collection system

Separate & take to recycling centres: garden waste too big to compost, batteries, metal, tyres, oil, rubble, wood, fluorescent tubes, cardboard, broken household appliances, fabric, shoes, cardboard drinks cartons. 

Food 

Eat less meat (intensive meat production uses far more land, water and fossil fuel based fertilisers and pesticides than vegetable based protein) free range/grass fed local is best.

Grow your own, on your patio, garden or allotment (share an allotment)

Local food saves food miles

Learning about and use seasonal food saves food miles, it is more likely to be locally grown

Shop locally to reduce your transportReduce packaging and use your own bags

Use box schemes &/or farmers markets

Organic food saves pesticides and fertilisers made from fossil fuels, but needs to be local where ever possible 

Transport 

On foot or bicycle for short journeys is good for your health and the planet (if you live in a hilly area an electric bike could be a good investment)

Use Train or Buses where ever possible

Smaller and more fuel efficient cars

Car sharing or lift sharing

Avoid air travel where ever possible

Work from home where possible

Be more aware of and use local facilities, activities, events and festivals

Find out who to inform about inadequate and needed public transport in your area 

Purchases 

Do I need it?

Can I rent it, share it, borrow it, swop it?

Is it obtainable second hand?

Remember, Charity shops, Car boot Sales, Freecycle, Salvage yards

Enjoy making & mending things & learning to do this

Support local crafts people and businesses

Buy quality items that will lastBuy

Fairtrade

Consider the energy efficiency of appliances

Buy cleaning products without fossil fuel derivatives e.g., Ecover & Essential

I am a fervent supporter of shopping locally and encouraging local produce as I know it will be vital to our future as we come to the end of a fossil fuel economy, but Anne Lanyon-Hogg’s article in the September Clock made me realise that what I do in practice doesn’t yet fully match my thinking or my rhetoric so I gave this some thought.

I realised that I have a major learning exercise to go through.  I grew up (I am 65) in the sexist age when men didn’t do household shopping and shops were generally only open when men were at work or on Saturdays when we were exhausted and expected to be waited on.

When our 3 children were young in the early 70’s I started my household shopping apprenticeship (it was still relatively unusual for men to be actively shopping rather than just occasionally pushing the cart).  It was in supermarkets, slowly I learnt about appropriate package size so stuff wouldn’t go off or run out too soon, then it was date stamps, label reading to avoid additives, preservatives, artificial sweeteners, later still fair trade and no air miles if possible.  I started to be able to think in meals rather than lists and all these tempting treats started to appear more and more on the shelves and freezer cabinets and then they were in my cart.  The bills grew and grew:  most visits there were things in the cart that weren’t on the list or in my head when I entered the shop.  Now I know that the cost of a trip to the supermarket with the fuel to get there is considerably more than some sensible local shopping.

I am now a furtive experimental local shopper.  I do it rather tentatively and I am enjoying the conversations and the sense of being part of a community.  I have a pang of conscience when I drive by with an excuse “I am going to Malvern anyway so I might as well shop there”. The people who serve me in the local shop, some of whom I now know by name, always seem to welcome me despite that fact that I keep lapsing into my old habits.  Clearly I have been addicted and it is going to take some time to retrain myself, but there is some real hope as when it is not raining I can do my shopping on my electric scooter and feel very virtuous.

Colwall Greener would like to start a Local Traders Support Group anyone interested contact robin@robincoates.com or 07973 721 809 there is much we could do and enjoy doing to help the traders and break our own habits.

I have just put a link to our phase one report on the front page.

I was at a meeting of the bridge action group on Monday and they were wondering about what to do to encourage the local traders and suggested a shop in Colwall week. This sounds like a good idea which we could work together on. I wonder what would be the best time - after Easter or later?

To round off the Colwall Festival.
A Glimpse of the Imminent Future
By Colwall Greener

On Sunday 20th July at Threshing Barn, Lower House Farm, Evendine Lane Colwall Greener will be offering Colwall residents an opportunity to see & hear about how some residents are preparing and adapting to the ever tightening pressures of Climate Change and Peak Oil.

There will be:

Displays and short talks about the various approaches residents have taken, in their homes, food and transport.

DVD’s showing solutions adopted in other countries to give us a sense of what is possible and the benefits that come from taking concerted action.

DVD’s showing to explain why we must act if we are to forestall a catastrophic future for our children and grandchildren and why we have to do this in the next few years.

In the afternoon there will an opportunity to form & join small action groups wishing to help the village move on.

Please join us to help build a more sustainable future, in friendship and community.

For more details &/or to get involved contact Robin Coates 01684 540 284 or robin@robincoates.com

These are a few bullet points from our discussion (or at least what I remember of it!)

• Colwall Festival.   We will do something at the tail end of the festival, on the 20th July.  This will probably be an information stall but it would be nice to do some visits to houses with energy saving features.
• The web site.  You’ve found it, hooray!  Now you can register and make some comments and posts yourself.
• Orchards.  The project is going great guns, with several orchards surveyed, some owners contacted, and some noble chafer frass possibly found.
• Local climate impacts.  Helen mentioned this, having been contacted from Herefordshire council.  The idea is to make preparations to counter the effects of the climate change which is inevitable - flooding comes to mind, after all Colwall gets cut off in heavy rain these days.  This could make an interesting school project (hydrography and all that).  There’s a climate impacts web site which is worth a visit.
• Bags.  Still discussing this, but Upton’s plastic bag free activity is very interesting and their web site has some good links too.
• Date of next meeting: 18th February, 7.30pm at Lower House Farm

We had a very interesting orchard survey training day on the 24th, and we all left with a sample of beetle poo to identify noble chafers. Why these beetles particularly? Well, they are rare and if you can make the habitat OK for them, it will probably suit the rest of the beetle tribe too. Anyway, the orchards are very interesting and we have a lot of them in Colwall and we ought to make more of them.

We are now all set to survey the other orchards in Colwall and then take the project on for another year.

While researching the church’s electricity requirements, I have been delving into green electricity supplies and finding it far more complicated than I thought. The problem is the renewables obligation (RO) which requires all suppliers to provide a certain percentage (currently about 6% and rising by 1% a year) of their electricity from renewable sources. The mechanism uses certificates which are produced by the renewable generators and bought by the suppliers. The effect is that the cost of the renewables option is spread over the consumers - it’s like a carbon tax. Green electricity tariffs are larger than non-green tariffs, so the question is, what are you getting for your money. If the supplier only provides electricity out of what it would need to do anyway, the premium on the green tariff is only going towards the company’s profits.

So, if you want a green supplier, you need to find someone who gets their electricity from a generator who does not sell all of their RO certificates for the electricity they sell. This does not apply to most green tariffs, although some of them support green funds and some plant trees. On the whole, I would have thought you either go for a standard tariff or one which is really green which could be 20-30% dearer than the cheapest standard tariff. I am not sure that I could recommend that to the church (the difference is £2-300 a year).

I did a survey of people’s attitudes to climate change during Colwall Fund Day, before having to give up because my survey sheets were getting soaked and all the text was running off! I didn’t find anyone who really was a climate sceptic – I think the message really has got across and people are seeing the effects in the weather they are experiencing. However, I found very few who were prepared to do anything serious about it, and a definite feeling that they were fed up with the whole topic. Perhaps the rain didn’t help! Typical answers included, ‘I’m doing what I can – isn’t this enough?’ ‘I’ m too old for it to affect me’ and ‘This is all being over-hyped’

Generally there seems to be a failure to appreciate the nature of the problem.

However, people are doing things. Almost everyone I spoke to had done something to reduce their carbon footprint, if only from the point of view of reducing costs. This included the straightforward things like changing habits and doing some insulation. I think the message that you need a foot of insulation in the loft has not gone across and some people don’t seem to venture into their lofts at all (where do they put their junk?) They are put off doing other things by cost and the light bulb effect – that is, having a stock of perfectly good light bulbs which they want to use up first.

Almost everyone was doing some form of recycling – kerbside collection really has made a difference and everyone uses charity shops.

Dramatis Personae: Chris, a retired civil servant; Robin, a consultant.

Chris: I was trying to ask myself why I hadn’t got round to changing my light bulbs to energy saving ones.

Robin: And what was your answer?

Chris: Well, one was the thought that I had a box of spare bulbs in the work room and then I found a web site which sold them cheaply in boxes of ten and then I thought, what I need to do is go through the house and make a list of all the bulbs and their fittings and then I shall know where I am.

Robin: Whenever I talk to people in government with some problem on their hands, they nearly always think of doing a survey, which takes them a year and when I come back they are no further forward. You know perfectly well the three lights to change and you will get 90% of the benefit from changing those.

Chris (thinks): Consultants!!! But I must admit, he has a point. (out loud) Thank you Robin!