Belated Earth Day thoughts

I didn’t expect to be posting so soon again, particularly with the trip looming, but Lolly has been making me think after her post on going green. Being in the UK limits my energy supplier choices quite a bit – sadly I don’t think we have any electricity suppliers who work on wind or water supplies only. We do use those low energy bulbs and we’ll be getting a stove installed to cut our gas consumption, feeding it mainly with newspapers from work, so we will be smoke free while we burn. We don’t drive, which will help our footprint in one way, but as we live in the sticks, it makes it harder to transport items for recycling, and our council, while providing green wheelie bins for some residents, can’t supply our row of houses with one because of the way they are built (there is nowhere hygienic to store them, and the bins would have to be brought down a steep set of steps). They gave us a composter for free though, which doesn’t seem to be breaking down very well, so we ended up throwing things away more often than putting them in for compost. Plus there are a lot of fields here, and fields = rats and foxes, and a lot of cats, which makes it difficult to leave food around when they could probably lift the door on the composter and nab things they shouldn’t. Any tips on making composting work while deterring animals without harm? I’m growing potatoes this year, which I’m really excited about! I’ve heard that planting Marigolds (I think) can help reduce certain pests like greenfly or similar to help protect your plants, and I try to use green garden products at home. Luckily, some plastic stuff we buy is degradable (like sarnie and bin bags), and we use recycled kitchen and toilet roll. We gift to charity shops wherever possible, and use local suppliers for some foods like eggs, but again, transport restrictions mean we can’t always buy local veg 🙁 The farm shop is only 20 mins away, and yet we don’t shop unless we have some help from a car owner as it gets too heavy to carry back across the hills 🙁
My yarn consumption is hardly wonderful with overseas purchases too (although does that mean I should order big when I do order ;D), and travelling by plane to Barcelona on Saturday is naughty, even if it is ultimately for DB’s work.
Nobody ever said improving your footprint was easy, and DB and I are making baby steps towards it, which can only be a good thing. All we need is the gumption to decide to change something and my library school skills to find the help online to do it. And to stop being so lazy about carrying things from the shop ;D Thinking these things through in public really makes you think about whether ‘can’t’ actually means ‘won’t’ and how much power you have over yourself to change things. I’ll certainly think twice now about where I get my frivolous purchases from, and how I shop for food stuff…