Is this a whole new psychiatric condition?

I’m talking about “recycling paralysis”. How much of my life has now been lost hovering over the cluster of different rubbish/recycling bins in the corner of my kitchen, staring at the scrap of matter in my hands, trying to decide if it is recyclable or not?

I live in Greenwich, which actually has quite an advanced recycling policy. They’ll take all kinds of paper and cardboard, metal tins, glass and plastic. Well, not all plastic, and there’s the rub. Some bits of packaging have clear symbols to show they are recyclable; others don’t discuss it. Still others have sad notes saying, “Sorry: not recyclable”.

But the instructions from Greenwich do say that they’ll happily take plastic carrier bags, for example—and this presumably means even if the bag itself does not have a recycling logo on it. But how far does this extend? Does the plastic bag that an armful of potatoes came in count as a carrier bag? It’s almost as big as a small one. And what about clingfilm?

It’s all become more complicated recently, and you can’t afford to get it wrong round my neck of the woods. We have one blue-topped bin for all recyclable stuff. We also have a green-topped bin which used to be for rubbish, but is now specifically for compostables—food scraps and garden waste. Everything else goes in black bags which I think are burned somewhere (to fuel power stations or something else useful, I hope).

But put the wrong thing in the wrong bin and the bin men won’t touch it. Some passer-by threw a Betterware catalogue into our compostable bin the other day and the bin men turned their nose up at it, doubtless thinking to themselves, “Don’t these fools know the difference between a compostable and a recyclable? What century are they living in?”

The poor family living at the end of the street, whom I think may be Korean, don’t seem to have quite got the hang of the complex recycling rites and put everything in the same bin—which smells as if it hasn’t been emptied in some considerable time.

And what about metal: does this include anything made out of metal? What about the metal caps on bottles? Or nuts and bolts? I was sent a strange promotional object from Jack Daniels: I think it was some sort of marker for poker games or perhaps just a paperweight. Anyway, it was a substantial chunk of stainless steel. Is that recyclable?

In fact Greenwich borough has a space-aged facility in Thamesmead where all these recyclables are sorted by various Heath Robinson machines; paper and card are extracted using the “trommel screen” (which sounds like part of a medieval church). Residual bits of paper stuck to bottles and containers are removed by the “ballistic separator”, where I assume they are shot off by highly-skilled marksmen.

Does this mean that even if I unwittingly include the Wrong Kind of Plastic in my blue-topped bin, there are machines who will simply pounce on it and dismiss it with the flick of a robot wrist? Or will I undermine the whole system—bring the trommel screen grinding to a catastrophic halt as klaxons blare, red lights flash and scientists in white coats shrink from instrument panels exploding in sparks, while men in silver hard hats arrive in little buggies and run about. Oh hang on, I’m getting confused with Bond movies. (“Do you expect me to talk?” “No, Mr Bond, I expect you to recycle.”)

I think my Recycling Paralysis has just taken a new disturbing turn…

Winging It

Well, I've completed the first step of the Challenge: I've switched my electricity supply to Ecotricity. Even though I'd done the research weeks ago, I had not got round to making the switch till yesterday—not because it was hard to bring myself to click the button that would mean I was choosing to spend more than necessary, but simply because I assumed it would be a tedious process that would keep requiring me to find obscure figures and documents. In fact it was disturbingly simple to make the switch via a tariff comparison website: you just give them your direct debit details and they sort out everything else, including giving the bad news to your existing supplier. Good thing I wasn't drunk at the time. I'm now going to have nightmares of waking with a sore head to find that, on an inebriated whim the previous night, I have just switched my domestic supply to SatanPower Plc or The Puppy Torture Energy Co. Or just some nutter who's wired together 8,000 PP3 batteries and set himself up in business.

Anyway, it's done. Will the other steps become easier, now that I've made this start? We shall see. This month's challenge is undoubtedly one of the Big Ones: to stop flying.

There’s no getting away from it—one long-haul flight can probably make a mockery of a year’s worth of careful domestic green tweaking. There are alternative ways of getting to the US or Australia but there are two big stumbling blocks: time and money.

I was asked to be an usher at a wedding this August in Syracuse, New York, shortly after the Green Challenge started, so I seriously looked into the possibility of taking a ship there. I discovered that aren’t actually many vessels plying that route—specifically there is now just the Queen Mary 2. (Well, I suppose you could hang out round the docks and hand a fistful of grubby notes to the one-eyed captain of a rusty tramp steamer to let you bed down in the engine room, no questions asked. Or maybe it doesn’t work like that nowadays: today’s ships are probably all crewed by robots and powered by lasers.) Not only are you limited to the dates that the ship is actually setting off, but even the cheapest QM2 ticket is about £1,600, rising to a tasty £26,000 for what is effectively a duplex flat, doubtless stuffed with Old Masters and a Jacuzzi filled with champagne. (In fairness, there do seem to be various special offers, so you might actually get a berth for more like £800, though this would be a cabin with no windows; it also seems that your ticket determines which of the many restaurants you’re actually allowed to dine in, so you could forget your Captain’s Table fantasies.)

Perhaps even more significantly for most of us, it takes six days to get there and presumably another six to get back. So you’d have to take two weeks off work, and you’d still only spend two days of that in America. No wonder cruises are so popular with old people—retired folk are the only ones with the time to do it. Even the promotional material comes pretty clean about this: there are no twenty-something models in their brochures. The aspirational figures here are silver-haired captains of industry and their trophy wives. So you’d have to think pretty carefully about whether you’d actually want to spend six days going to tea dances, playing quoits and wondering what’s for supper. (Only joking: the QM2 has a discotheque. And a planetarium.)

In fact my own carbon footprint in this area looks to be pretty respectable this year. For other reasons I probably won’t be able to make the wedding in Syracuse and I have no other plans to fly. My wife Ali and I have rented a cottage in Cornwall in June and we’re planning to visit friends in Copenhagen later in the year, a trip we’ll probably make by train or boat. (In fact I’ve had some great experiences on Eurostar, and if you’re travelling around suppertime it can be worth upgrading to first class—if there’s a deal on, the meal alone can be worth the extra money.)

To be honest I don’t particularly have a travel bug. I’ve had some memorable holidays (including a trip of a lifetime to New Zealand a few years ago: just try getting there by boat. Even www.seat61.com, a website dedicated to train and ship travel, admits there is no alternative to flying) but left to my own devices I’d probably never get round to going anywhere. (I could spend my entire holiday allowance just sitting in the recording studio that I’ve assembled in the spare room. Well, I say “spare”, but in fact you can scarcely move in there nowadays for towering racks of boxes covered in flashing light. Mmm…) It’s mostly at Ali’s instigation that I travel anywhere further than Oddbins.

In fact last year, aside from flying to Guernsey from Southampton, the only flights I took were on business (Ali did fly to Thailand, so her carbon footprint is now sasquatch-like). I went to a conference in Nice and I did actually look into going by train. But the convenience of the plane won out on that occasion.

I suppose that’s what it all comes down to: we want so much these days. We expect to be able to zip to the other side of the planet without the journey inconveniencing us that much. We all expect to be able to see as much of the world as only explorers and veteran seafarers would have glimpsed in the past. Let’s hope they crack teleportation some time soon.

Ecotricity more eco than previously reported

It seems that the robot spiders who run the internet have informed Ecotricity about my deliberations: I've received an email from Madeline Carroll of Ecotricity who mentions that the details about the company that I read on the two comparison sites I used (energyhelpline.com and uSwitch.com) are rather out of date. Whereas they claimed the Ecotricity electricity is "10%+ green", the actual figure for 2006/2007 is 30%.

From my point of view this means that Ecotricity's tariff is even more clearly the greenest of those I've encountered, if not the cheapest. But even the cost is pretty vague—energyhelpline suggested that it would cost me £19 a year more than I was currently paying, yet uSwitch insisted I would actually save £19 a year on that tariff. I haven't cross-referenced this any further with other sites, but I guess the message is that this is what you should do before making a change.

Last thing I heard Ecotricity were off on the warpath to harry the comparison sites into updating their details. In the meantime I gather that Ecotricity's Dale Vince has launched his own blog. You can find it at http://zerocarbonista.com/.

How green is green?

I talked over my dilemma with Susannah and her response was:

“This is a fiendishly difficult area. First of all, as to whether one form of green energy is greener than another, they all have an impact on the environment (I was reading only today how putting up wind turbines was leading to soil erosion in some moorland areas because of the heavy trucks transporting them).

“A lot of people consider the only truly green green tariffs to be Ecotricity, Good Energy and Green Energy. Green tariffs, as we say in the article, are only truly green if they are investing heavily in the renewable energy infrastructure. Those that buy a quantity of electricity from green sources to match your consumption are creating demand for renewable electricity, but not necessarily investing so that we can all benefit from green power in the years to come. The rule of thumb is, I'm afraid, that the more genuinely green the electricity, the more expensive it is.

“I think the gas deal is all about offsetting. Burning gas is pretty ungreen and, by definition, you can't buy gas that isn't, well, gas. Offsetting is better than nothing, but it doesn't discourage consumption and companies arguably just trade credits rather than make any effort to be greener.”

Hmm. It sounds as if, out of my options, Ecotricity is the one to go for if I'm serious about greenness. It'll cost me more, but thanks to my dopiness about being on the most competitive deal up till now, it would only cost £19 a year more than I'm currently paying.

Moreover, if we decide that there's no such thing as a green gas tariff, then I might just as well switch to the cheapest—which will save me £78 on what I'm currently paying. So I still emerge from the whole exercise paying £59 a year less than before. Hurrah!

In search of green electricity

Life can be pretty hectic at the Digest—we’ve been without an Editor-in-Chief for nearly five months and everyone’s feeling the extra workload—so, like Susan Saville in our article on page 56 of this month’s magazine, I may have been thinking about green energy but I certainly haven’t done anything about it. The planet will doubtless heave a sigh of relief that the Green Challenge has forced me into action.

And action, as I sit down to address the matter this Saturday afternoon, comes in the form of consulting energy price comparison websites. Going through our energy bills for the last year or so, I establish that we seem to have used 4,547 kilowatt hours of electricity and 24,860 kilowatt hours of gas (powering the combi boiler, oven and hob).

Is that a lot? We must benefit from the shoulder-to-shoulder insulation of living in a terraced house, and we keep the thermostat at 19 degrees C (it used to be 20 degrees but we recently made a conscious decision to turn it down). As for electricity, we have the usual appliances but we only run the washing machine and dishwasher when they are full and we don’t leave the TV or stereo on standby. OK, so one room of the house is filled by a small recording studio (one of my foibles) but I would like to point out that most of the equipment is not actually on for most of the time and doesn’t use much juice when it is—the whole room is powered from just one double wall socket.

Anyway, the first thing I discover is that I’ve actually been overspending. When energy was deregulated I switched, and have done again since, ending up getting my gas from Atlantic and my electricity from British Gas. But clearly I haven’t been keeping up: apparently the cheapest tariff for me now would actually be £220 a year less than I am paying! (Mind you, this seems to be a prediction based on current rates; according to my calculations I haven’t paid as much over the last year as the websites claim I’m paying. I guess this reflects recent rises in energy charges.)

OK, so let’s tear ourselves away from the cheapest tariffs and look at the green ones.

Looking at combined electricity and gas tariffs, the interweb comes up with Scottish Power’s H2O deal, which provides “100% green electricity from hydro-electric”. This will cost me but £5 a year more than I am paying… bearing in mind that I’m apparently paying £220 more than I need to. In a strange way, my own incompetence at keeping us on the most competitive tariff makes this all a lot easier—I could switch to a genuinely green tariff and not really notice the difference. True, I’d still be paying more than I have to, but a lot of the time this green malarkey boils down to the sacrifices you are willing to make to Do the Right Thing.

Actually, it’s a bit more than that—because there is also the question of what the Right Thing really is. I notice, for example, that if I leave my gas account as it is, and simply change my electricity to the H2O deal, I will actually save £38 compared to what I’m paying. What’s going on there? Why is there a premium for the gas part of the H2O tariff? Are some gas tariffs are greener than others? It seems they are—Southern Electric’s “Power 2 Nil Service Charge” tariff also offers 100% hydro electricity but further claims that gas usage is “partially offset through tree planting”. Hmm, “partially”. E-On’s “Go Green” tariff seems to offer both 100% renewable electricity and 100% carbon offset of gas usage through Climate Care (whatever that is).

And then you’ve got Ecotricity, a purely green supplier. Interestingly, they only claim to offer “at least 10%” green electricity. The deal with them is that they invest heavily in wind turbines and in fact invest more heavily per customer in green energy than any other supplier.

Which makes me wonder if wind turbine greenness is greener than hydro greenness. Ali tells me that she thinks hydro has been associated with damaging the environment through the building of dams, as least in some parts of the world. I don’t suppose that’s an issue in the UK but I start to wonder if there is some eco-legerdemain going on here. I mean, what if everyone in the country suddenly switched to a “100% hydro” tariff? Presumably there simply wouldn’t be the capacity. So, ultimately, would I be doing more good by signing up with Ecotricity, who invest in the future, even if only 10% of their juice is green now?

Before I make a decision, I’m going to go through these issues with Susannah Hickling, an ex-deputy editor of the Digest who is masterminding the Green Challenge. I might also ask my friend Max Carcas who, as it happens, works in the field; he’s involved with a wave power project, so he must be clued up on what’s really green and what isn’t. I’ll let you know what I find out.