Milk

Did you know what the carbon impact is of a pint of milk? No, neither did I.

Anyway, apparently the humble pinta contributes 800g of carbon to produce it, but you can knock 60g off that if you recycle the plastic bottle it comes in.

To put it another way, it's equivalent to me driving about 6km (or roughly 3 and 3/4 miles) in my trusty Peugeot 206. Or it's roughly equivalent to a unit (1KW/h) of electricity - most calculations come out betwwen 400g-to-1Kg per unit depending on whether it's coal or gas you are burning.

I've got a sneaky suspicion that when I calculate the carbon impact of food miles/production then this will far outtsrip my household electricty usage (meaning I need to take a closer look at this aspect of my overall impact than I have hitherto been doing....)

Enrico

Measuring up

I've now put up on this site some graphs tracking my home energy use. I've been sad enough to have been taking regular meter readings since I moved into our house, so I can now look back and see how we've been doing.

I've been thinking of the other key measures which I need to track to understand if I am making a 10% (or greater) difference and will start to track these too soon, such as:
- petrol usage (for both cars in the family)
- flights (exclusively for work purposes, but am counting as my impact)
- food miles (trying to work out a way to measure that....)
- consumer goods consumption (another difficult one to measure)

Enrico

The 10:10 Campaign

A few weeks back my electricity company emailed me with some info about a campaign called 10:10, whose basic premise is for individuals to try and make a 10% cut in their environmental impact in 2010.

I thought that this was a good idea and so signed up immediately. Since then, the campaign has been gathering momentum with numerous individuals and companies (including the company that I work for) signing up.

I began to think about what is the best way for me to ensure that I do make an effort to make a 10% difference? After some thought I resolved to measure my progress publically in a blog, so I need to make the effort else the world will be able to see that I have not....

So.... here we are. On this site I will be tracking my progress, sharing my ideas & thoughts and writing about my journey.

Enrico