My butt on guardian.co.uk

Was browsing the interwebs on my iPhone the other day and I happended on a picture of my butt on the guardian.co.uk website (on their "Green Living" blog).

It is safe to click on the link, as the butt in question is of the water storing variety....

The water-butt thing is something I have been doing for a while, I have half a dozen of them linked up with plans for more. I even started a group on Flickr a while ago as an experiment to see whether you could get poeple posting pictures of things as dull as water butts, and they did.

Enrico

Measuring....

I bought a energy measurement thingy today which tells you how much electricity is being used by stuff that's plugged in to it.

So you can expect me to be terribly boring and tell you how much electricity each of my TVs/PCs/gadgets etc. use........ Ah, the fun I have.......

Enrico

Huzzah!

Just noticed today that my company's new travel booking system puts the CO2 impact of any flight on the itinerary sheet. Makes it staggeringly easy to measure impact over the year.

Don't know yet whether it is a simple kg per mile calculation, or if it is more sophisticated and takes into account the type of aircraft etc., but very welcome in any case.

Enrico

High Impact Week

This week I'm having a high-impact week, unfortunately, by flying to Korea (I have to say that Incheon Airport in Seoul has the best arrivals experience that I have ever seen - immigration, baggage reclaim and customs were a breeze).

All this reminds me that I need to go back through my diary this year and to calculate my airmiles and hence impact due to air travel.

Even though all my air travel is work-related I still want to measure it and reduce it for 2010.

Enrico

Mayoral support for 10:10

Article on BBC news today about Boris Johnson saving the founder of the 10:10 campaign from some "oiks".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8340865.stm - amusing and disturbing in equal measure.....

Enrico

Small steps

I am looking at all angles of our food's carbon impact now, and the research is showing up some suprising and sometimes quite disturbing & counter-intuative information.

For example, which is environmentally better (for a UK resident):

a) buying UK produced lamb
b) buying New Zealand produced lamb

Aha, I hear you say. That's easy, the UK lamb as you don't have to transport it halfway around the world. You'd be wrong.

New Zealand lamb is fed purely on grass and clover growing on the hills and mountains, wheras farming methods in the UK mean that animal feed (produced using a suprising amount of petrochemicals) is used in the UK. Also, a suprising amount of electricty is used in farming, and a great deal of electricity is produced in New Zealand using hydro-electric rather than the mainly fossil-fuelled UK. The result being that UK produced lamb has a larger carbon impact than the stuff produced in far-away lands and shipped halfway around he world.

(note: this difference may evaporate once we clean up our energy generating capability in the UK)

Anyway - the small step (of the title of this post) is that the wife has managed to source, from our local farm shop, flour that is produced within a ten mile radius of our house. So at least our bread is now mostly local....

Enrico