Sustainability is the hot topic, with people worried about green everything and we are going to hear a lot leading into the election this year about environmental issues and solutions. The big push around the world is toward carbon neutral activities.
A quick search for “carbon neutral” on the net got around 1.5 million responses, from scientific papers, companies advertising themselves as carbon neutral and those offering to help you be carbon neutral. So what exactly is carbon neutral – that’s harder to find because there are many different ways to talk about carbon neutral.
The first looks at the things you do, works out how much carbon dioxide those things release and finds away to lock away that much carbon. This is not zero emission.
In the house the largest item of energy use is electricity. This is an easy one – even when you aren’t able to install your own renewable energy source like wind turbine or solar voltaics you can ensure your supplier gives you energy from renewable sources. All you need to do is tell your supplier that you want them to supply you with Green Power – from a guaranteed renewable source.
But the other big energy user for families and businesses is transport, fuel for cars. It is not so easy to source a renewable source of petrol, and let’s face it very few people are in a position to make new car purchases very often, but if you are then consider fuel efficiency in your purchase. But even without a new car you can save plenty of petrol and therefore dollars and CO2 by the way you drive – check this out.
Fortunately we can pay a little extra to have organisations do things for us to offset our emissions. Some will plant trees; others invest in renewable energy technologies.
Events like Peats Ridge festival last summer became entirely carbon neutral, using renewable energy, ensuring that suppliers trucks are fueled by Bio-diesel, even making sure that the plastic in disposable cutlery is from biological sources rather than petro-chemicals.
Sometimes it is easier to do it on the large scale of a festival or concert tour than it seems as a householder or small business. So what can we do?
Well reduce, reuse and recycle are still the best words to consider but lets ad re-pair and re-source
Reduce – because every dollar you spend produces emissions, no matter how careful we are in every other aspect buying things means they have to be made.
Reuse – Because everything you don’t throw out is one less thing to replace, think the “Green Bag”.
Recycle – considered carefully recycling offers serious environmental savings – recycling 1 aluminium can saves the electricity of 3 hrs of television watching.
Repair – our throw away society has become the nemesis of CO2, transport of waste, the release of CO2 and methane as materials break down, production of new materials, all add significantly to our emissions.
Resource – find new less polluting ways of getting things. Source food locally where possible and buy things in season. Buy Green electricity from your supplier.
Green power is the obvious choice to ensure your electricity is carbon neutral.
