Carbon labelling

The Carbon Trust has been pilotting a scheme to introduce a carbon footprint label on certain products.  This will give consumers the ability to make an informed choice about how much carbon has been used in the growth, manufacture and shipping of the product.

The carbon footprint of food is impossible for the normal consumer to make an informed choice about.  A good example of the contradictions involved is a tomato.  They are grown in huge heated greenhouses in the UK.  It has been shown that a tomato shipped or even flown from Spain has a smaller carbon footprint than one grown here due to the enormous heating costs.

It is something I really struggle with, as I am just guessing when I’m at the supermarket.  And due to a lack of information I tend to give up and not think about it.

If they could make a universal scheme work (this is a big if, I can see all manor of complications in the implementation of this) then I would love to see something really simple like the traffic lights scheme for calories, fat etc.  A red, orange or green light would really influence my shopping habits and help us to really find out the worst carbon offenders in our shopping basket.

Oven baked tandoori salmon

Ingredients

• 2 salmon fillets
• ½ small pot of natural yoghurt
• Juice of half lemon
• 1 thumb ginger
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp chilli powder
• ½ tsp turmeric
• ½ tsp garam masala
• ½ tsp salt

Preparation

Grate the ginger and garlic on the fine side of the grater. Mix all the ingredients except the salmon together. Put the salmon in a plastic bag and mix in the yoghurt paste. Marinade for at least an hour. Cook in a pre-heated oven at 180′c for 20 mins.

Replace your fridge, save a power station (or six)

I’m not particularly into random factoids but I found this one pretty impressive (if its actually true of course):

“if we replaced all large domestic appliances with energy efficient ones we would provide savings of up to 3.6 TWh – the equivalent amount of electricity needed to power over 1 million UK homes for an entire year!”

This came from the time to change website: www.t2c.org.uk or http://tinyurl.com/chh9sf

Green purchases that I actually use

Recently bought a water bottle from these people:

http://www.onegreenbottle.com

and I’ve used it every time I go out.  Its a pleasing design, kids can use it too and I think I’ll buy another one for when I go to the gym (eventually).

It made me think about other green purchases I’ve made, I think I’ve probably bought quite a few.  Washable nappies were a failure sadly, as was one of those remotes that turn your devices off standby.  In fact I think the only thing that I use regularly is one of those Onya bags that rolls up really small and fits in your handbag.  Its great.

Everything else was a waste of money and more of a tax on the environment than a help.  I am now much more choosy of what I buy.

Halogen light bulbs

When we got a new kitchen last year our builder put in halogen lights – 12 of them, each at 50W.  Making a grand total of 600W of power every time we turn on the lights.  Which is a lot of the time at this time of year.  They are often on from 5pm until 11pm.  From using our electricity monitor we can see that this is the biggest drain on our electricity use.

This in itself is surprising – its not the cooker or the TV or all those devices we leave on standby its just the lights!

So what to do?  Simplest first, turn the lights off.  And we are trying, sometimes only having half of them on.  Trying to turn them off when we leave the room etc.

What I’d really like to do is replace them with LEDs.  But the technology isn’t there yet.  It turns out that a 50W LED costs £20+ each.  Thats an unacceptably large amount of money to replace them all.  See here for details:

http://www.yourwelcome.co.uk/acatalog/GU10_LED_Lamps.html

My only hope is that technology has improved vastly over the last couple of years (50W halogens were not available at all until very recently).  So if I wait a year or two more (hopefully when my existing halogens start to go!) they’ll be down to an acceptable price and available in my local B&Q.

I’m really surprised that halogens haven’t really been addressed by shops.  Our local B&Q is full of energy saving light bulbs for standard lights.  But how much of a normal house uses these now.  Not that much I’d say.  I think its just the bedrooms in our house – maybe 30% of our total lighting.  And I don’t think other people are that different.  So energy saving bulbs are a help and I definitely use them where I can.  But realistically they don’t address that much of the issue at all.  And until there is a solution for all forms of lighting (small odd sized side lights are another problem as the slightly bigger energy saving candles just don’t fit) we’re not going to make much progress.

Texan chilli beef stew (slow cooker)

As stew is our staple winter food, I like to try as many different varieties as possible. This is kind of like a chilli – you can even add a tin of kidney beans – I would but my husband says they are too farty! It is however really tasty and melts in your mouth. You can obviously cook it for less time in a hotter oven if you so wish.

Oh and it isn’t really Texan at all

Ingredients

• 1 tbsp olive oil
• ½ kilo chopped casserole beef
• 2 tbsp plain flour
• 1 tsp flaked chilli
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 2 tsp paprika
• 1 tsp salt
• 3 cloves garlic – finely chopped
• 1 tin tomatoes
• 300g butternut squash and sweet potato or similar (peeled and chopped)*
• *yes I use a bag of pre-prepared (from sainsburys)

Preparation

Toss the chopped beef in the flour, spices and seasoning until it is well-covered. Heat the oil in a large oven-proof saucepan and wait until it is really hot. Add the beef to the saucepan and brown all over. It is likely to stick to the bottom so don’t worry. Add the chopped garlic and fry for another minute.
Add the tinned tomatoes and the veg and bring to simmering point. Add a bit of water if it looks like it might dry out during cooking.
Transfer to a slow cooker for about 8 hours or else cook for about 4 hours at 120′c.
Serve with rice or couscous.
Can be frozen.

The lovely Co-op bank

I would really like to have the Co-op as my bank account.  They’ve just introduced a new ethical policy, although their old one wasn’t half bad either.  This new policy incorporates such things as human rights and ecological impact.  Their ecological impact statement now makes sure that they do not invest in such things as tar sands and biofuels.  I wish more banks had such a good understanding of these issues and had the courage to put them into practice.

http://tinyurl.com/bzwjoc

Sadly I don’t have a co-op bank account.  On a business front this is for practical reasons as they did not offer a good enough internet banking option to customers.  On a personal front its more complicated – fear of change, loyalty to my existing bank, and fear of the complications that will arise when I try and change over.  Maybe I should overcome that fear, it is for a very good cause after all.

Carbon cost of google search 1000 times less than boiling a kettle

A few days ago, the BBC new website published this article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7823387.stm

which states that 2 searches on google uses “as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle”. Now I’m pretty sure this is a load of cobblers, it doesn’t make sense and is disputed by google who say a search only uses 1/35 of this amount.

Firstly I have a problem with the recognition that this study is getting by being front page technology news on BBC.  Its been reposted all over the internet and taken as the truth.  We all like to trust the BBC implicitly so I find reporting an article which is obviously hocum as a bona fide study causes all kinds of trust issues.

Secondly I think some basic calculations using my own electricity monitor could prove that the study by US physicist Alex Wissner-Gross is flawed.  The article suggests that a good proportion of the energy use in the search is by the use of a standard home computer for the search.  My home computer draws 96W of power and a search takes 0.24 secs.  So the energy use for a typical search on my computer is 0.0000064KWh.  As a rough estimate I will calculate the total energy use for a search as twice this – to allow for the power needed in google’s data centres (using big power hungry servers for a tiny fraction of a second).  So I have a grand total of 0.0000256KWh as the total energy use for 2 google searches.

Compare this to  boiling my kettle with the minimum amount of water (about 1 cup).  Power use is 2.007KW while boiling and the time taken to boil the kettle is 55 seconds.  So total energy used in boiling the kettle for one cup of tea is 0.0307KWh.  Final results are that boiling a kettle takes rougly 1000 times more energy than doing 2 google searches.

Now I know that this may not be the perfect calculation but I think my sums are relatively sound.  Obviously where I am missing information is on how much power is used at google’s end.  Even allowing for my calculation to be out by several factors I could not get anywhere near the result suggested.  Now I am not a physicist but i was once a mathematician, but I’m pretty sure my ’study’ won’t get the same recognition as Alex Wissner-Gross!

Excellent service

I left £80 in a bank machine last week.  I felt extremely stoopid.  But I was so impressed by the level of service I got from the bank where i drew out the money (Barclays) where I don’t even have an account.  I went into the bank as soon as I realised it had happened and the lady in the branch said she would look into it personally for me when they opened the cash machine the next morning and would phone me as soon as she knew.  She phoned the next day to say that she had found the money and would credit it to me via my bank.  She even apologised for the fact that it might take up to a week to reach my bank account.  I’ve now got the money back and my bank has also written to me apologising for my mistake.

The biggest car in the world

Just had to buy a new car because our old one couldn’t fit 3 children across the back and we are expecting our third in January.  So we’ve ended up with a lovely purple tank – Citroen Picasso Grande.  Its so completely not very green – although its fuel consumption is not too bad (compared to other big tanks).  If we could have bought something greener that would have transported our entire family plus luggage I would have done.  But I haven’t been able to see a way round it.