tips for going green

[mervin]

on’t throw away those large plastic beer and cider bottles. Drink the contents first.

Collect plastic packaging and empty plastic food containers, and store them until you have enough for one large bonfire. Having several small bonfires is inefficient. Pick a day for your bonfire when there is a stiff breeze. This way, all the little burning smuts of plastic and the choking fumes will be carried away from your garden.

Think about cycling instead of driving for a second. A second is plenty long enough.

Vegetables are a good source of vitamins, minerals and fibre, so eating them is recommended. Eating vegetables needn’t be expensive. Steal next-door’s potato peelings from their compost heap and use them to make potato soup. Growing your own mushrooms to add a little variety to salad or to slice onto homemade pizza is easy. Place half a loaf of damp bread in the back of the cupboard under the sink, and in a few short weeks, after Mother Nature has been to work, you will have an impressive selection of fungi, all of which are perfectly safe to eat.

Encourage your children to grow some cress in a margarine pot on the windowsill. It uses up an empty margarine pot, which would otherwise go into landfill. Your kids will learn a valuable lesson in horticulture and self-sufficiency, and they will be engrossed in watching the cress grow instead of fighting or playing on the Xbox. With careful tending, come harvest time, there will be plenty of cress for a whole sandwich.

When you have a chip pan fire, do not put it out with water. Carefully set the burning pan in the fireplace, and use the heat given off to warm the room or to dry clothes.

Don’t throw rhubarb leaves into the dustbin. Don’t waste them by composting them either. They are rich in oxalic acid, and the engine casings from an old parallel twin will be as good as new after an hour simmering in a large pan in a solution of leaves and water. Any remaining solution in the pan will produce a robust rhubarb wine if bottled and left to ferment in the attic for nine weeks.

Conserve water. Because the water companies lose so much of it through leakage, we are encouraged to eke out what is left:

Maximise the use of the water in a shower. Share your shower with other members of the family. Since most shower trays aren’t big enough for more than two similarly sized adults, shower with relatives of diminishing size instead. If each showerer stands beneath the chin of each taller relative, up to seven people can shower simultaneously. There are serious economies to be made in shampoo and soap this way, too. Use depilatories with care.

Water the houseplants at the same time. Exercise care when showering with those tall cacti that are equipped with large spines. Most cacti are species accustomed to an arid or semi-arid habitat, and require little watering. Just look at the giant saguaro cactus of Arizona and the desert southwest. Big, aren’t they?

Economies can be made with bathwater too. Placing several house bricks in the bottom of the bath will reduce the amount needed to fill it. Clean your teeth while in the bath, but don’t do this until all the family have used the water. Rinsing and spitting into the water before others have bathed is not very hygienic – human spit contains more bacteria per milligram than even the fiercest most horrible animal spit you can imagine.

The remaining bathwater may be kept in sealed containers in a warm place (the airing cupboard is ideal) and used later for cooking vegetables. Keeping the water warm for a few days will lessen the energy required to heat it to a rolling boil. In case you are wondering whether or not this is safe, bear in mind that boiling the water in the pan will kill any germs, and pubic hairs are easy to spot in mashed potato. Also spuds and carrots grow in soil, and soil is dirty.

Park your car in your neighbour’s flowerbed when washing it. You get a clean car; he gets his red-hot pokers watered and thus has no reason to complain about your extravagant use of the hosepipe.

The average family toilet uses 15,000 gallons of water a day. You can reduce this by 50% by doing every other big job in your neighbour’s vegetable patch. His cat does it in yours, after all. Resist the temptation to do them all there. He may become suspicious. Buy a large stuffed cat and nail it to your shed roof. If your neighbour does begin to ask questions, point to the stuffed cat and shrug your shoulders.

Leaving your television on standby wastes enough electricity to power a town the size of Kirkcudbright for a year. Have it turned it on all the time instead. Why should the grumpy Scottish people who live in Kirkcudbright get free electricity for a year when the rest of us have to pay for it?

Drive fast. Driving fast reduces your journey time, and therefore the time that your car is pumping out hydrocarbons. An engine running at full-throttle is running at peak efficiency. Avoid braking. Braking wears out components prematurely. Cutting through garage forecourts at junctions saves time sitting idly at traffic lights.

Don’t waste money insulating your loft. Often you may be tempted into buying loft insulation in the summer, when it is less expensive, but resist this marketing ploy. The effort required to install insulation in the summer in a loft in which the temperature is 163 degrees Fahrenheit uses the equivalent of 4 megawatts per hour. If you did it this summer, your investment would begin to repay itself in March 2103. What use is that?

Double-glazing is a waste of money. For double-glazing to be effective, all the windows in the house need to be closed. If you keep all the windows closed, your ears will pop whenever you open the front door, you will wake with a headache, and farts will linger interminably. Double-glazing is no more than a scam perpetrated by disreputable companies who cannot survive by selling plastic fascias and soffits alone.

Don’t waste money on expensive hot-water tank jackets. Most of us have a grandma who will leap at the opportunity to knit one with a bobble on the top.

Collect rainwater from one of your down pipes in a butt. You will be making a valuable contribution into the ongoing battle against malaria and the life cycle of the anopheles mosquito.