Have your green cake and eat it too
by Allison Hunter on 25/08/10 at 11:26 am
Are you one of those people that feels a slight pang of guilt every time you put a plastic bottle into the bin?
Or hangs their head slightly at the airport in case people tut at you for flying on that holiday abroad?
Cotton nappies or disposables? Grow your own, pick your own, or organic? The road to green enlightenment is littered with confusing messages and unclear advice.
Part of the challenge is that the biggest changes we can make can often seem the most dull.
Lagging your loft and bunging up those draughty gaps can save you a heap alongside swapping your old banger for a gleaming new Prius, but they don’t make quite the same statement.
But there is one green thing you can do that only takes about five minutes, and you only need to do it once. And you don’t even need to leave the house. It’s changing where your energy comes from.
Already your eyes might have glazed over with thoughts of call centres or complicated websites. And if you’ve ever looked into it, you’ve probably come across claim and counter-claim about who’s the greenest.
For instance, you may have seen companies offering a ‘100% green tariff’ and what could be any greener than that? But as usual, there’s a little more to it than that.
Imagine a Victoria sponge cake (as everybody likes cake) that represents all the energy made in Britain, and the jam is the thin layer of green energy spread through the middle. The UK’s jam is currently about 6% – half the target for what it should be.
Everyone with a normal (‘brown’) energy supply gets a slice of the electricity cake, with jam through the middle, whether they like it or not. But most green energy providers are just scraping off some jam and selling it back to you, often at a premium. So you get 100% jam, and everyone else gets a bit less.
The crucial thing is that the amount of jam hasn’t changed. This is how most green tariffs work, just re-distributing the same green energy that’s already around, while not actually making any more. But there is an energy company that does make more jam – sorry, green energy – by reinvesting the money from customers’ bills back into building new sources, instead of keeping it as profit for shareholders.
Ecotricity, the world’s first green energy supplier, is a social enterprise more interested in people and the planet than profit. Its aim is to make Britain greener and less reliant on other parts of the world for our sources of energy. For every unit of new green energy it makes, one less has is needed from conventional polluting or depleting sources.
All of Ecotricity’s own sources of green energy – 51 windmills and counting – have been built reinvesting the money from customers’ bills.
Customers currently get nearly 50% of green energy from these, topped up with ordinary ‘brown’ energy. As more customers join and more windmills are built, that green figure will increase. And now Ecotricity is also using the same principle for green gas, which will be made from organic waste, for a truly green dual fuel.
Ecotricity’s philosophy is that the jam shouldn’t cost any more so they match the standard regional price of the ‘Big Six’, and this comes from a lovely team of people that aim to answer the phone within three rings.
So you really can have your cake and eat it – and feel good about it too!
To find out more and to receive a £30 voucher from Jo Wood Organics for switching to Ecotricity, click here
This article is sponsored by Ecotricity and the views contained within are not necessarily those of daisygreenmagazine.co.uk. But we pride ourselves in only partnering with like minded ethical organisations.
Related stories
