Eco-unfriendliness

With the impending arrival to our family it’s become a lot harder recently to plan for and be as eco-friendly as I would want to be.

Eco-pluses:

1. We compost everything that’s compostable (but we don't have a wormery)
   
2. Use Ecover for most of our detergents, cleaning products etc
3. (In theory) have an efficient condensing boiler
4. Get an organic veg box delivered every week
5. Recycle glass, cans, paper every week (though the council won’t take cardboard and we don’t save it to recycle at the tip, which is bad)
6. Buy local produce whenever we can vs. air freighted and support local businesses
7. Buy organic food, clothes, toiletries etc vs. non organic if possible (and affordable!)
8. Try and reduce our packaging wherever possible – use cloth bags for shopping (as often as we remember, which to be fair is about 80% of the time)
9. Garden organically
10. Bought a rotary airer* for our washing this summer and use it to dry our clothes outside
11. Plan to use washable cloth nappies not disposables
12. Cook almost all meals from scratch (I guess this is sort of eco friendly, as we would never buy ready meals and rarely if ever get takeaways other than the odd self-indulgent fish and chips from the chippie round the corner, which counts as supporting local businesses anyway!)

* or birley for those from north of the border…

Eco-bads:

1. After a few performance glitches and some internet searching we realised our boiler may not be as efficient as we thought when it was installed…
2. I love an open fire and will happily burn loads of logs and coal even when it’s not really that cold
3. As a result of number 11 above, we’ve just bought a tumble drier. There’s no way I am draping wet nappies over radiators in January. If the baby had been coming in June I might have risked it and hoped to be able to put them outside to dry but it ain’t gonna happen in the middle of winter.
4. When working at home during the recent cold snap I’ve had the heating on all day rather than stick an extra jumper on. I can see that from 5th December, when I’m at home all the time, and especially after Chewie arrives in January, the heating bill will be enormous this winter.
5. Prefer to buy new than second hand (though we are getting a lot of newborn hand-me-downs from Archie which is brilliant and so is a sort of eco-plus.)
6. Don’t think twice about jumping in the (petrol-guzzling sports) car and driving to see friends, family, do the shopping, etc which we could in theory do on public transport
7. I don’t think we have ever even attempted to measure our carbon footprints and don’t make a proper effort to avoid flying etc although we do like taking holidays in the UK and I foresee more of them will be UK based in future!

So overall it appears that we are doing more good to the planet than bad, however I do think our bads are big enough to outweigh the small effort of the goods. Must do better - watch this space...