How to do an eco audit -- the easy way

Making our carbon footprints smaller can seem like an overwhelming task. Where to start? Recycling, cutting down on meat, not flying, cycling, getting a green energy tariff, harvesting rainwater…the possibilities are infinite and often confusing.

Ballet dancer-turned-environmentalist and eco consultant Donnachadh McCarthy tells us how to go about it in an easy but effective way in his new book, Easy Eco Auditing -- How to make your home and workplace planet-friendly. We've had a look through it and thought you should have a little taster of it, too. Read on for an excerpt:

"In order to draw up a plan for making your home and your workplace eco-friendly, you will need to calculate your energy carbon footprint. It is my intention that reducing one's footprint -- and being proud of how carbon fit you are -- will become the eco-equivalent of feeling good about a physically healthier lifestyle.

"Many government agencies divide up national carbon footprints between the various job sectors, such as industry and transport, but this makes it difficult for individuals to take action to reduce their own footprints. Carbon footprints are calculated in many different ways but my preference is to stick to things such as heating, electricity, private transport and flights. These are easily measurable by people in their day-to-day lives, unlike the huge complexity of calculating the exact amount of carbon used in preparing a particular meal. This is not to say such issues are unimportant -- indeed, as Chapter 10 shows, food is the source of up to a third of our carbon dioxide emissions -- but they require detailed academic investigation due to the large amount of variables involved.

"In carrying out home and business eco-audits, I come across an enormous range of annual energy carbon footprints among my domestic clients, from the highest, at 66 tonnes, for a well-off Hertfordshire family with a swimming pool, to the lowest, an astonishingly small 1.4 tonnes, for the entire family of the Friends of the Earth press officer, Neil Verlander. Average household emissions in the UK are 6.2 tonnes, according to the Department of the Environment.

"When working with clients, I ask them to fill in a form listing how much electricity, gas, heating oil, coal, water, rubbish, petrol or diesel they have used, how many flights they have taken in the previous year and how many times a week they eat meat. [There's an eco-audit form at the back of the book so you can fill it in at home or at work too]. Simple calculations then convert these figures into tonnes of carbon dioxide and an energy carbon footprint for the year. It is true, of course, that almost everything we do in life, from breathing (like all other animals, we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide) to shopping and eating and drinking, will result in carbon dioxide emissions because of the production, transport, packaging and disposal involved.

"The essential message is that wasteful consumption leads to increased levels of carbon dioxide, which is leading to climate catastrophe. One way of getting this across is to calculate the amount of water you have used and the amount of un-recycled rubbish you have dumped in the previous year. The results could stagger you."

Partly through his own impressive eco-story and partly through general information, McCarthy then goes on to show us step-by-step how we can reduce our (carbon) consumption bit by bit at home and at work by doing everything from treating waste as a raw material to generating our own electricity. He also explains mush-used and often little-understood terms such as "zero-carbon", "low carbon" and "offsetting", which we find really helpful.

This text is copyrighted by Octopus, publisher of Easy Eco Auditing -- How to make your home and workplace planet-friendly by Donnachadh McCarthy (Gaia, RRP £7.99). You can purchase a copy for the special price of £5.99 with free UK postage and packing. To order please call Littlehampton Book Services on +44 (0)190 382 8503 quoting GA29.

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