Memorandum submitted by Alex Ross (CRED
22)
This is not an application to give oral evidence
at the CRed meeting with EFRA, but a written letter explaining
my thoughts.
I graduated from Nottingham University in 2005
with a degree in Classical Civilisations and now work full-time
in Admin.
With regards to experience I have none except
for being keen on "Green" issues, I am a member of the
WWF and also donate monthly to Fareshare, a food charity that
takes food destined for landfill and redistributes to the vulnerable
and needy. I have a green energy tariff with Scottish Power H2O
Green Fund, have a water saving device in my cistern, have energy
saving light bulbs and so on, and have been using the CRed Norwich
site for many months now.
I live in Leeds but was still encouraged to
use the site by CRed as they wanted to expand into a nationwide
project, which I would love to see.
An expansion of the CRed project would be excellent,
it lets people see how their own actions can affect the climate,
and offers various solutions on reducing energy use. It also shows
how plenty of small actions can add up until you are saving thousands
of KGs of energy going into the atmosphere every year.
An expansion of CRed into a nationwide scheme,
or something similar, could see initiatives like this go into
schools to teach children how to be more green in easy ways, from
growing veg in a school garden, to understanding how to turn things
off at the mains at home to save energy.
For the government to make "green"
choices easier, it desperately needs to expand the recycling services
available in the UK. Although it is excellent DEFRA have managed
to oversee a doubling of the recycling rates in three years, we're
still far behind many places in Europe and I believe this is partly
due to the amount of discrepancies in councils over what you can
recycle, and also the inability to recycle many items such as
batteries, light bulbs, tetrapaks (a big sinner) and so on. If
people want to recycle these items then they have to pay themselves
for it to be sent to the appropriate places.
I believe a real way to make a difference in
people's attitudes is for the government to act to reduce people's
cynicism with regards to climate change, from the people who believe
it doesn't exist, through to the people who believe green taxes
would be used to line the treasuries pockets and there is nothing
the individual can do. We need a "green awareness" proliferation
on a bigger scale than the Y2K issue back in 1999.
Perhaps all it needs is the government to stress
what it is already doing, and then do it more. There are for instance,
energy saving light bulbs made cheaper through government grants,
but I only found them after searching online for weeks, make these
more readily available so people can see the cost-effectiveness
of CFLs, similarly offer companies bigger incentives (and punishments
for not doing it) to make energy efficient products, and increase
recycling for old, out-of-date appliances.
I believe a lot of the framework is in place,
it just needs fleshing out, so people can understand that every
part of their lives has an affect on the environment and that
there are very easy things they can do to make positive change.
One of the biggest problems I believe is that
so much of the hyped solutions then turn out to be wrong, or not
as green as initially touted, such as hybrid cars and so on, people
need to understand "carbon footprints" more and they
can only do that with proper help, such as from the government.
If packaging (which needs to be reduced anyway!) had a list of
energy used in every stage of production it would give people
a clearer idea of how things were made.
People need to understand cause and effect more,
caring about the environment can be done in lots of different
ways, even down to using more eco-friendly products in the home.
I hope this has been of "some" help
to you, even if it only shows how committed some people are and
how much we're supporting the government in all it does while
pushing it to do more!
Thanks for the opportunity of consultation,
I look forward to reading the results,
Alex Ross
January 2007
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