How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint is a fun book packed with tips to heat or cool your house, manage electronic devices, cook smarter, garden with nature, shop local, travel sustainably and change financial habits.
Use no-dig gardening and fruit protection bags (over netting, which can trap birds and wildlife). Learn how to create gardens safe for pets (use humane slug/snail deterrents). Avoid facing indoor foliage to outdoor gardens, to help stop birds flying into windows.
Ellen Tout is an eco living editor who has worked with Friends of the Earth, and is also a coastal guardian with Kent Wildlife Trust. A vegan who is passionate about reducing food waste, she lives in Kent.
Free Carbon Calculators
Download this free carbon calculator and work your way through to reduce carbon and bills. The Farm Carbon Calculator is a free carbon calculator toolkit, and takes 30 minutes to 2 hours to give a lens into how you can save carbon.
Developed by an organic vegetable farmer in the Scilly Isles, it can be used by farms of any scale or soil type or place in the UK.
Calculate the Carbon Footprint of Everything
The Carbon Footprint of Everything is an expert and entertaining guide by a carbon expert. Supported by solid research, just look up anything to find easy-to-follow charts and graphs.
From drying your hands to carrier bags and from boiling water to buying newspapers, this makes learning how to reduce your carbon footprint fun! Contents include the carbon footprint of:
- Having a child
- Ironing a shirt
- A glass of beer
- Getting cremated
- The World Cup
- Volcanic eruptions
- The Iraq war
Mike Berners-Lee is a professor who specialises in carbon footprinting. He is professor and fellow of the Institute for Social Futures at Lancaster University, and director and principal consultant at Small World Consulting, based in Lancaster Environment Centre.
Do Bamboo Products Cut Carbon Footprint?
Bamboo products are popping up everywhere. From kitchen utensils to flooring, this humble plant is touted as a green alternative to more traditional materials. But do bamboo products really help reduce our carbon footprint, or is it just clever marketing?
The good news is that certified organic bamboo should not negatively affect pandas. This is because industrial (moso) bamboo is not the same as fresh shoots eaten by our bear friends. It’s ironic that although China does not have the best animal welfare record, it does protect its pandas. So in summary, (a little bamboo in moderation) is fine, if sustainably harvested.
Bamboo is the world’s fastest-growing grass (if you sat there for a few hours, you would see it grow in front of you). As strong as steel, it can be harvested in a year. Whereas forest trees can take 30 to 40 years to mature enough to harvest (or old-growth forests are torn down to produce fast-growing saplings that use chemicals and don’t provide homes for wildlife).
You can see the appeal. But bamboo could grow in England (it would need enclosed spaces as an invasive plant), most bamboo is imported from Asia. Rayon bamboo is from cellulose and viscose bamboo is from pulp.
But many brands blend it with chemicals and synthetic fibres, and if overplanted to keep up with demand, this creates ‘monocultures’.
This has happened with palm oil (forests home to orangutans chopped down to grow fast-growing plantations, and flammable eucalyptus trees over-planted to make ‘biodegradable packaging – Spain and Portugal have already banned new plantations, due to increasing wildfires).
Some say the ‘local alternative’ is Tencel, a wood fibre grown in Europe. But like eucalyptus trees, the wood is flammable and has led to wildfires, which is why many people are concerned if it got too popular. As industry would then go mad and start planting more trees than is good for nature and wildlife. As the answer with everything – simple living and buying less!