Eco-dilemmas solved

4:46pm Friday 28th November 2008

All the top tip columns make being green sound so easy: just change your light bulbs, walk to the shops and do your recycling, but it never really works out like that. SARAH LEWIS turns agony aunt and answers some of your pressing eco-questions.

Less than keen to be green

Dear Sarah,

If I am totally honest, I am not massively interested in being green but I know I should do something, even if it’s just a little thing.

Due to my lack of interest, I can’t really cope with doing anything that takes a lot of time and effort.

Do you have a top five things I can do to assuage my eco-guilt without leaving my sofa?

Dot, Hove

Dear Dot,

It’s great news you want to do something. But while, of course, I am very thankful for any attention the planet gets, a little enthusiasm wouldn’t go amiss.

I’ll give you your list of five things in a minute, but none of them are going to be anything you haven’t heard before: make sure you recycle, switch to green energy, turn things off when you aren’t using them and so on.

If you wanted to do those things, I expect you could do so easily enough.

If you really want to effect some profound change, the key is to find something – anything – that genuinely does interest you.

For example, I am astoundingly uninterested in being a vegetarian, even though I know what terrible havoc the meat industry wreaks on the environment. For me, to choose to stop eating meat is a mission surely doomed to failure as soon as I smell (free-range, organic) roast chicken.

However, conveniently, I am also very uninterested in owning lots of useless, resource-draining stuff, so I make up ground by not shopping for lots of pointless tat.

Not everyone has to do everything, but with most people doing just a little something, we are going to make great gains. Anyway, here are your five sofa tips, assuming you have to hand a phone and a laptop: 1. Call Ecotricity on 08000 326100 or Good Energy on 0845 456 1640 and switch to a green electricity supplier.

2. Go to www.writetothem.com and email your councillors, MPs and MEPs asking what definitive action they intend to take on environmental issues.

3. Read an environment-based book, ordered through the internet and brought to your sofa by a flatmate.

I recommend The Big Earth Book by James Bruges (£25).

4. Snuggle up under a blanket and turn the thermostat down.

5. Bookmark the following websites and read them every now and then.

Information is the most powerful tool any of us have:

• www.enn.com
• www.guardian.co.uk/ environment
• www.telegraph.co.uk/ earth
• www.theargus.co.uk/ goinggreen

Thrown out with the bath water

Dear Sarah,

I love having really deep, hot baths with oils and scents and candles to help me unwind after a long and stressful day.

My boyfriend teases me because sometimes I fill it up so much it overflows when I get in.

I know it’s a waste of water but I truly value them. Do I really have to stick to five-minute showers or is there any way of having an eco-bath?

Emily, Hove

Dear Emily

It is an often repeated eco-adage that we should shower instead of bathe to save water. Certainly Southern Water are proponents, saying the average bath uses 80 litres of water as compared to 30 litres in an average shower, and the Environment Agency (EA) says a five-minute shower uses about a third of the water of a bath.

However, the EA also says power showers can use significantly more water than a bath in just five minutes.

And it is worth being honest with ourselves here: very few girls are going to manage a five-minute shower every day – for me, hair-washing alone takes about that time.

There is no point standing in the shower for ten or even 15 minutes thinking you are doing your bit, when actually, a bath could have used less water and had the added benefit of de-stressing you. So what to do?

One simple way of working out what works for you in your own house, if your shower is over the bath, is to put the plug in the plughole next time you have a shower and see how high the water is when you finish.

You also need to consider whether your bath is replacing a morning shower or is it supplementary?

If you calculate the bath is a bad thing for our straining aquifers, then perhaps you can consider another form of relaxation.

Meditation can work wonders and there are classes all over the city, some of them even free of charge.

But ultimately, no one is going to berate you for having a relaxing bath every now and then. If you do dive for the candles and scented oils, use natural oils.

And invest in a bucket.

The water can be used to feed plants when you are finished instead of being wasted down the drain.

Wake up and smell the coffee

Dear Sarah,

Can you help solve an ongoing debate in our office please? I would really like to see the phasing out out of paper cups completely, but others say they are better than reusable mugs we would have to wash up.

It’s become a bit of a heated debate among my colleagues and I am worried I’m fighting a losing battle.

So what is better: paper cups or mugs dishwashed in a dishwashing machine?

Ben, Brighton city centre

Dear Ben,

Mugs, every time. And this is why: for every paper cup you use, some trees have to be grown (possibly on land which was once rainforest), watered, fed (probably with petrochemicalbased fertiliser), chopped down and processed.

They are then made to look pretty, covered in wax to stop them leaking, which also makes them nearly impossible to recycle, shipped to your offices, used once and then thrown in the bin to sit in landfill for the next few hundred years.

That is for every single paper cup.

You probably use about three or four a day, with, 500 people in your office, that makes about between 1,500 to 2,000 a day, or 10,000 a week. And that is for just your company.

So the mug wins instantly by dint of being reusable. As for a dishwasher – well naturally the easier and quicker way to wash your eco-mug would be to just rinse it under the tap.

It’s only tea with your own germs – it’s not going to kill you.

But modern A-rated dishwashers aren’t so bad. A lot of them, if they are stacked full, use less water than doing it by hand. And you can afford one with all the money you will save on paper cups.

To prove your point further, you can jazz up tea time with the Global Warming Mug from www.firebox.com, pictured, which lets you watch the land disappear as the ice caps melt under the heat of your hot beverage.