Five things I have done today to help the planet… [16 Sep ’19]

Power to the people!

I dream of having a solar PV / battery backup system one day soon. In the meantime I will have to put up with the odd powercut here and there.

Also today I cut some printing, got some good food from Good Club, moved some wood and had a vegan sausage roll for lunch...

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1. We had a powercut...

Today we had another powercut.

This was just for a couple of hours and we only get them three or four times a year so I shouldn't complain.

But it reminded again why I really, really want to get our solar PV and battery backup system set up.

Money, of course, is the big limiter on this. In fact this was why I joined Steem in the first place. But that is whole other story.

Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully the PV/battery system will be next year's main capital expenditure / home improvement project.

Solar technology has advanced quite a bit since I started looking at this three years ago, so maybe the costs will have come down a fair bit as well.

For today, at least I had my double UPS setup in place which allowed me to keep working for almost an hour into the powercut which was most useful as I was working to meet a deadline just as the electricity went off.

I made it.

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2. Say no to printing!

One neat little advance I made for the business today was to implement another major step in our move towards a totally 'paperless office'.

My business cut down on sales invoice printing a while back. From today we are no longer printing purchase invoices.

This may not sound like a big deal as we are only a small business. But even for us that is about 60 A4 pages not printed each month.

That's a ream and a half of paper, and probably two ink cartridges saved each year. A little gain for the planet and about a £50 saving in costs for us.

I love hunting down these little 'planet & purse' savings. They are all small now but they all add up.

And if they were replicated across maybe 10,000 small businesses across the country...

Are there any small savings like this you can make in your business or workplace?

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3. Good Food from Good Club

Another delivery came from Good Club today.

It is an online delivery service that specialises in wholefoods and organic foods, with some good bulk discounts.

I usually buy a selection of organic products from them usually at about 20% cheaper than in any local organic selling shops.

They also have big plans to move towards a 'closed loop' zero waste system where many dried goods will be delivered in their own returnable, plastic free containers.

They have recently raised over £400K ($500K) through a crowdfunding offering on Crowdcube to help them become "the world's first zero-waste online supermarket".

Good Club is one of the small organic / renewable investments I have made through Crowdcube so I am interested to follow their progress.

I have also been involved as a beta tester for their new website that launches in a few days.

Check out their new site next week if you are looking for a cheaper place to order organic products online.

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4. Moving the woodpile

In the storms of the previous winter a couple of the large old Leylandii came down and blocked our lane.

They were too big for me to handle so we had to get a tree services company in to clear them.

As part of that they cut them into 3 foot (1m) lengths and left them stacked on the far side of the yard.

They have dried out well over the last year so this evening I started moving them over to the wood shed ready for the winter.

Leylandii don't make the best firewood but will be fine for the open fire.

One of my longer term plans is to switch to a full log fired heating and hot water system.

We have space for the big buffer tank required but even with the Renewable Heat Initiative ongoing tariff payments it is still too large an investment at the moment.

Although with current happenings on the oil front the economics might swing in favour of a wood fired system sooner rather than later.

We have 15 acres of free wood on our land, but no oil wells.

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5. Another Vegan Sausage Roll

I'm not a great one for buying from food chains like Greggs but today I was given one of their vegan sausage rolls.

I am vegetarian, not vegan, and the rolls are not organic but they don't taste too bad and they make a change.

While their healthy eating credentials might be a little suspect - they contain more calories than a McDonalds cheesburger - they have been hugely popular and a major commercial success for Greggs.

From an environmental perspective they certainly have a much lower carbon footprint than a standard pork sausage roll. They have also no doubt opened the eyes and ears and hearts and minds of a good number of people to the idea of eating non-meat alternatives.

For my lunch I souped its planet friendliness a bit further by adding some locally produced organic runner bean chutney and a handful of mixed oriental salad leaves from the greenhouse...

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That's my day on the planet today.

How was yours?

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[ header image from unsplash.com // solar PV image from pixabay.com // other images from @pennsif ]