HOWZAT

7. Washing up by hand

Washing the dishes is one of those rare parts of modern life where progress, happily, does not equal ecological devastation. The old way is definitely not the best. To achieve the same effect as a dishwasher you will need plenty of piping hot water (electrically heated for maximum ‘ecocide’ points) and of course a constantly running hot water tap to get a good clean rinse. Do all this after a big meal and you could be using 150 litres of water and four times the energy a modern dishwasher needs to achieve the same effect. Gaia wants you to stop washing up by hand. Great, isn’t it?

8. Margarine

Sometimes (albeit rarely) trying to be healthy is the least green option. The world of ‘healthy’ dairy alternatives is largely predicated on the idea that all dairy products are inherently bad for you, particularly in terms of fat consumption. As with virtually any food, too much dairy is a bad thing. But the fats in good dairy products such as butter can promote, rather than damage, health. The synthetic transfats in refined vegetable-oil products such as margarines can, however, have the opposite effect. And the term ‘vegetable oil’ might mean palm oil, whose plantations often spread at the expense of virgin rainforest. Even if it is a more locally grown plant oil (sunflower, say, or rapeseed), its production will most likely have taken place in a highly industrialized monoculture.

9. Cruising rather than flying

If it’s a sail-powered cruise on a boat made from FSC-certified wood, then clearly it would be higher up the green rankings. But most cruises are on dirty great big liners that burn vast tonnages of fuel, splurge huge quantities of waste into the oceans and fail to contribute anything but pollution to the beauty spots they visit. Even after new legislation has come into force for all cruise ships by 2010, they will still be able to dump hundreds of thousands of litres of untreated sewage (per ship) out at sea; and they will continue to emit large volumes of greywater (from washing, for example). And the fuel consumption of some liners is so great that they rival aeroplanes for litres per passenger kilometre.

10. Polytunnels

They may excite nimbyist ire in areas where they pop up on a large, industrial scale to feed our insatiable national strawberry habit, but polytunnels are often at the centre of the very greenest smallholdings. The main reason is cost: a monster 90-foot-long polytunnel can be yours for the price of a tiny posh greenhouse. So for those looking for the ‘Good Life’, polytunnels make financial sense. They end up at the bottom of the greenhouse scale for two reasons: materials and lifespan. Polytunnels use aluminium frames and plastic covers, both of which contain vast amounts of embodied energy, and whilst they can both be recycled, this too is an energy-intensive process. The plastic sheeting has a relatively short life because it is degraded by ultraviolet radiation, meaning that tunnels need to be re-skinned after as little as four years. However, assuming you use low-impact growing techniques, these energy costs will be more than cancelled out by the reduced food miles and general green value of growing your own.

Extracted from Shades of Green: A (Mostly) Practical A-Z for the Reluctant Environmentalist, to be published by Transworld on January 1 at £10.99

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