Tips for Greener Travel

Prior to travel – what you can do

• Perhaps selling your car would be a good idea – public transport needs support! It’s no good complaining about services not being good enough, we must to demonstrate a consistent need for public transport in order to show the government and business that it is something worth investing in to improve.
• If you’re going on a short journey that’s 5-10 minutes down the road, walk or take a bicycle there, don’t drive. Firstly it’s incredibly lazy. Secondly while you may have concerns about how ‘safe’ it is to walk down the street, consider how safe it would be if everyone did this! If everyone was on the street walking around, then the feeling of potential threat would be lessened.
• Plan your journey carefully, listening to traffic news. If you live in London, use the TFL website (www.tfl.gov.uk) to see the situation on the roads, rail, DLR and river.
• If you have heavy objects in the boot that you don’t really need to be transporting everywhere you go – take them out! The extra weight will require more petrol to power, raising your fuel usage levels.
• Something that many people forget to do because they do not realise the potential benefit is to check their tyre pressure – if not at optimal levels the extra effort needed to move on those under-inflated tyres will be borne out in the amount of extra petrol consumed to compensate.

 

During travel – while you’re at the wheel

• Drive smoothly and efficiently, try to avoid fast acceleration or sudden braking as this uses more fuel.
• Driving slowly and making full use of your gears (going all the way to 5th instead of lingering in 4th while at speed for example) will help to minimise fuel consumption.
• If you’re sat in a jam going nowhere, turn your engine off. More and more cars have this auto-off feature which shuts down the engine when at standstill and starts up as soon as the accelerator is de-pressed.
• Regularly check your car’s oil levels, water levels, condition of tyres etc to ensure that there is nothing causing your car to spend unnecessary amounts of fuel.
• If it’s a cold day, turn off your air conditioning! Even on a hot day, simply lowering the windows and allowing the wind to act as a coolant will save you petrol.
• Keep an eye on your fuel consumption levels – any major fluctuation and you should go to your local garage to get things checked out as there may be a fault with the engine.

When buying a new car – what to do/look for

• Consider the possibility of car-sharing. If you’re living with someone you work near or are in a family that has more than one driver, you may be able to work out a sort of schedule that allows you to drive each other to work and share a single car. One car per family might well be enough!
• If you’re buying a new car, buy a new one as manufacturers are making them more and more environmentally friendly with better mpg statistics and less pollution than older models.
• Try to go for a smaller car – this will leave the roads less clogged up by lumbering behemoths and they are generally more fuel efficient.

Improvements in the car industry

• Back in the 1930s cars would feature 25 miles per gallon and a top speed of 60mph. Nowadays, with LPG becoming much more prevalent and advances in diesel engine technology, you can achieve 60 or 70 miles per gallon.

Supermarkets

These have become necessary evils in the pursuit of convenient lives for the majority of the Western world. Undoubtedly for those on low incomes they have been very helpful in helping to maintain a comfortable standard of living on a low budget, and this is often forgotten by those who rush to condemn. However there is a good case for arguing that supermarkets perpetuate themselves by forcing alternatives into a position where they cannot fairly compete – witness the death of local stores, butchers, bakers, cornershops all going out of business as the latest 24 hour supermarket moves into the neighbourhood promising everything you ever need to buy under a single tarpaulin.

Here’s a statistic that may shock you – for every £1 spent by every household, 49p of that is spent in a supermarket. Of this 49p, 33p is spent in one of the four largest supermarkets which are Asda, Tesco, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s. So for you, as someone who wants to shop ethically (we hope, otherwise what are you doing here?) your choice of supermarket is crucial.

Positives associated with the proliferation of supermarkets:

• Easier access to Fair Trade products
• Easier access to organic produce
• Easier to discern whether products contain GM food – M&S has a non-GM policy for all of its products.
• Allows consumers to determine their style of living with a lot more choice than if the only shop on the high street was a butchers that sold parsley and cucumber as ‘vegetables.’

Negatives brought about by the presence of supermarkets:

• Accused of ‘destroying’ local communities by creating empty high streets with none of the traditional trades able to compete with these all-powerful conglomerates.
• Supermarkets promote industrialised farming methods – so the more the better, that sort of philosophy, leading to poor treatment of farmers and producers who are in no position to bargain with the supermarkets who in turn can dictate what price they are willing to pay.
• Transportation for the food to get to your plate – food miles – is a big concern. We have situations where food is exported at exactly the same time as the same product from abroad is imported, or where we import food we could easily grow ourselves. As if the carbon emissions concerns were not enough, consider the plight of animals transported in cramped containers hundreds of miles to be slaughtered.

Case example: your Sunday roast

Chicken from Thailand                                  10,691 miles by ship

Runner beans from Zambia                           4,912 miles by plane

Carrots from Spain                                       1,000 miles by lorry

Mange tout from Zimbabwe                          5,130 miles by plane

Potatoes from Italy                                                1,521 miles by lorry

Sprouts from Britain                                    125 miles by lorry

This works out at a total of 26,234 miles for a lunch that, if you’d bought the ingredients at a local farmers market, might have reduced the total journey to just 376 miles!

How to be an ethical patron of your supermarket:

• Find out about the various supermarkets and their practices, only go to those whose ethical practices you agree with.
• Reuse your old carrier bags or use cardboard boxes
• Try to use your local shops as much as possible.
• Buy food from your local markets – and walk!
• Pay attention when you’re buying at a supermarket – try to buy goods that are produced as close to home as possible.