From The Times
December 27, 2007
Shades of green
Paul Waddington



Now that we’re all supposed to be saving the planet, should we go back to washing our dishes by hand? Should we boycott those miserable chickens raised on factory farms? Take a sledgehammer to the bathtub?

Even if you’re a hardcore environmentalist, you may be surprised by some of the answers. Being green these days is a complicated business. It turns out that almost all human activity can be measured in shades of green: from greenest to not even a little bit green.

If we accept the current global scientific consensus, then each person’s individual contribution to greenhouse gases – in particular, carbon dioxide – needs to be reduced by three-quarters. That means reassessing just about every choice we make in our daily lives . . .

BANANAS

The most popular fruit in Britain, with sales worth £750 million a year, racks up plenty of food miles. But at least bananas are delivered by sea, which is 100 times less polluting than going by air.

Greenest: fairtrade organic bananas

Surely all the food miles, refrigeration and artificial ethylene-ripening involved in banana production mean that the greenest solution is to stop eating them altogether? Not exactly. Thanks to various twists and turns of colonial history, several national economies are now completely dependent on the banana trade. If we stopped buying, what would they do instead? Whatever they decided to do next, it could be a lot less green than growing bananas. So supporting best-practice banana-growing may be a sound ecological investment: and organic production, though tricky, eliminates the heavy use of agrochemicals.

Dark green: fairtrade OR organic bananas

No need for hand-wringing if you can’t find bananas that are both fairtrade and organic: either option is good. Fairtrade bananas soak up lower levels of agrochemicals than standard ones, and are unlikely to have been produced on a destructively large scale. Organic bananas, on the other hand, may not have been fairly traded, but their production will be on a scale that’s more likely to benefit small producers directly.

Not even a little bit green: any old banana

After cotton, bananas are the second most sprayed crop in the world. As well as getting regular doses of herbicides, fungicides and insecticides, the bunches are often wrapped in pesticide-coated plastic bags while still on the tree.

Five of the chemicals used on bananas are classified as extremely hazardous by the World Health Organisation, and three orga-nophosphate pesticides are applied that are not approved for use in the UK. On large plantations, which are mostly run by the four corporations that manage 80 per cent of world banana trade, more money is spend on agrochemicals than on workers’ wages.


CHICKEN

We’ve developed a fairly serious chicken habit in recent years: 20-plus kilos per person annually, or about one chicken a week for a four-person household. To meet this demand the British chicken industry kills 800 million birds a year, 98 per cent of which are raised in intensive systems.

The energy needed to raise the birds and produce their food is equivalent to the annual output of a decent-sized coal-fired power station, or one per cent of the UK’s electricity demands. And that’s before you consider the energy used in processing, refrigeration, packaging and retailing.

Greenest: chickens in the back yard

To be truly green, chickens should eat no more than the food you grow for them, which means you need about two-thirds of an acre of a cereal crop, such as wheat. Their waste should be recycled on to your land.

Dark green: conventional broiler chicken

Breeding birds for ultra-rapid growth means cramming up to 40,000 of them into a windowless, dimly-lit shed at a density of 16 per square metre, where they shuffle around in their own excrement during the whole of their short and unpleasant 40-day lives. However, if greenhouse gases are your main worry, you should opt for one of these miserable chickens every time. Because of their short lifespan, fast growth and crowded housing, these overbred, barn-reared chickens end up using 32 per cent less energy per tonne of meat to rear than organic birds.

On the negative side, their feed will itself have been intensively produced. Plus, chicken production on this scale produces tangible levels of pollution: the average ammonia levels inside intensive broiler houses are above the safe level for humans.

Still, at least broiler litter gets recycled: two-thirds of it is composted and used on the land and the remainder is burnt in power stations (so yes, one of your light-bulbs is glowing courtesy of chickenshit).

Quite green: organic

Their feed, which accounts for 40 per cent of the energy cost of chicken production, is organic, which means it won’t have been produced with fossil-fuel-based pesticides or energy-intensive artificial fertilizer. However, organic chickens live in small sheds of 1,000 birds and have double the lifespan of the broilers – which means they need much more food.

Light green: free range

Free range sounds great but can, in fact, denote a fairly intensive method of chicken-rearing. These birds must have access to one square metre of space each in the great outdoors for half of their 51-day life. Indoors, there are 13 of them per square metre. In practice, some of the free-range chickens stuck in the middle of a big, closely packed shed may seldom see daylight. Still, their short life makes for relatively low energy use.

Pale green: traditional free range, free range “total freedom”

Birds with these labels don’t get an organic diet and live in bigger sheds of up to 4,000 birds. But they have the same lifespan as organic birds, continuous daylight, access to the outdoors from six weeks of age and a minimum outdoor space of 2 square metres each. “Total freedom” birds additionally have unlimited outdoor space. In eating and welfare terms, the freedom birds are superior to free-range and conventional broilers: but with a longer lifespan, more space and nonorganic feed, they have a high energy cost.

Not even a little bit green: Processed chicken of uncertain provenance

Chicken in ready meals, takeaways and processed food may have made a long, frozen journey from countries where broiler sheds are worse than the UK’s worst.



TOMATOES

It’s almost impossible to buy a British outdoor tomato because nearly all UK commercial production is in heated glasshouses. Even imports from more tomato-friendly climates are likely to have been grown under plastic in an artificial substance.

Greenest: your own

They’re easy to grow, even in small spaces, and place no demands on the environment if you irrigate them with rainwater and grow them in your own compost. The only problem: your window of tomato-eating opportunity probably stretches only from August to October.

Light green: Mediterranean imports

Yes, I’m placing foreign imports above our own commercially-grown tomatoes. The majority of our imported tomatoes come from Spain (190,000 tonnes a year versus 78,500 grown locally), where there’s heavy use of pesticides and polytunnels, as well as excessive water abstraction in water-stressed areas.

On the plus side, Spain has far more sunshine than we do. So even taking into account the food miles – mostly by lorry – Mediterranean tomatoes result in the release of three times less CO2 than their more northerly glasshouse equivalents.

Pale green: UK glasshouse tomatoes

Interestingly, pesticide use has been almost eliminated in UK tomato production in favour of biological controls, such as natural pest predators, to deal with pests and diseases. The glasshouse environment offers protection against airborne diseases such as blight, and the irrigation water, which might otherwise leach unwanted nutrients into the environment, can be recycled.

Slightly paler green: UK glasshouse organic tomatoes

Organic growing needs nearly twice the energy and 20 per cent more water.

Not even a little bit green: Dutch glasshouse tomatoes

The Netherlands is the next biggest exporter of tomatoes to the UK, trucking 90,000 tonnes to us each year. But, with a similar climate to ours, they have no energy advantage: add on the food miles and Dutch tomatoes lose out.



NEWS MEDIA

The intuitive response when people are asked about the greenest news medium is: dead trees bad, internet good. But they’re ignoring crucial facts. The first is that trees are a crop, so the dead trees in your newspaper will soon be replaced by new ones. And the “internet good” assumption forgets the quite staggering power demands needed to put a web page on your screen.

Greenest: disconnection

For a deep-greenie, the only news that matters will concern events on his smallholding, and this can be gathered directly by him or other members of the community. Even weather forecasting can be managed in the traditional way, with pine cones, dowsing and divination.

Dark green: radio, preferably wind-up

The perfect option for the deep-greenie who secretly yearns to know what’s happening beyond the wattle-and-daub walls of the smallholding. Even plugged in to the mains, radios use very little electricity.

Light green: newspapers

A study by the Carbon Trust, which looked at every aspect of newspaper production from tree-felling to distribution, calculated that one copy of a tabloid is responsible for 174g of CO2 emissions. This is more than three times as much as half an hour of goggling at the TV news, but better, surprisingly, than a similar amount of time spent surfing news websites. Another plus: 70 per cent of newspapers are printed on recycled paper.

Perhaps surprisingly, delivery of heavy newspapers accounts for only a small percentage of their overall carbon footprint: paper manufacture is by far the most energy-intensive activity, followed by printing and disposal.

Pale green: the internet

A study this year estimated that the total power use of the servers that run the internet and their associated cooling and auxiliary services runs to about 170 billion kWh per year. This means that your carbon footprint for a daily rootle around for news on the web weighs in at 234.7 grams of CO2 per day, which makes a newspaper a far better environmental bet.



PETS

It’s said that the average British dog is better fed than the average human in the poorest 20 per cent of the world. Of course, the difficult calculation is what humans would do if deprived of their favourite pets.

Studies suggest that their bereft owners would be more likely to fall ill, which in turn would lead to negative environmental consequences by increasing the burden on the health service and requiring the manufacture of more medicines.

Greenest: garden wildlife and pond life

Manage your garden with strategic untidiness and, before long, you’ll have everything from invertebrates to birds and small mammals.

Just as green: honeybees

Honeybees, which play a vitally important role in pollinating plants and trees, are suffering a population crash caused by disease. Unless we step up our beekeeping activities they’ll die out. Plus, you get as much as 40kg of honey a year from a single hive.

Pale green: rabbits

They can destroy a vegetable plot in double-quick time, and still need bought-in food. However, they’re the only truly cute pets that are also edible, and therefore just make it on to the green scale.

Not even a little bit green: cats and dogs

Britain’s dogs alone consume 765,000 tonnes of food a year, which is converted annually into 365,000 tonnes of excrement and one billion litres of urine. Our cats get through 425,000 tonnes of food a year and kill 220 million small animals and 55 million birds.

Thanks to the concrete with which many canine and feline habitats are paved, many of the animals’ outputs get washed into water courses, where they have an adverse impact on aquatic ecosystems. Even if cats can be persuaded to use litter, most of it doesn’t rot down. And as neither cats nor dogs are particularly popular as food in this country, disposal is an issue: 200 tonnes of dogs are destroyed each year.



BATHS

No wonder taking a bath gets a bad ecological press: the average soak requires 80 litres, or more than half the average amount of water we use daily. However, modern showers are now catching up fast and threatening to usurp the bath’s position as the second biggest household water guzzler after the loo.

Greenest: jump into a river

For the hardest of the hardcore greenies, bathing is a nonessential use of a precious resource. We managed without daily baths for millennia, and millions still do. So why bother?

Dark green: bathing in solar or biofuel-heated rainwater

If you must have a bath, then heating it with renewable energy and using harvested rainwater at least makes the process resource-neutral.

Quite green: sharing

Two average showers use as much water as an average bath, and if they’re electrically heated result in more CO2 emissions: if they’re power showers, they’ll use a lot more water than a bath. So climbing into the tub together, or in sequence, is a great wheeze for saving both water and energy. Tip: don’t pull the plug as soon as you’ve finished. The water will carry on radiating heat – a useful contribution on a cold evening.



DISHWASHING

Most of us are interested in just one simple question: is it better for the environment to do them by hand?

Dark green: AAA-rated dishwasher, used only when full

It’s hard to get greener than a modern dishwasher (unless you use leaves as plates or wash with filtered rainwater.) With the latest models using 15 litres per cycle or less, mechanical dishwashing uses only a quarter of the water needed by an average hands-on session at the sink. So, over a ten-year lifespan, a dishwasher could save a British household 100,000 litres.

Quite green: incredibly fastidious manual dishwashing, reusing the grey water.

This entails rinsing in a separate bowl rather than under a running tap and the use of eco-friendly detergent so that the carefully saved waste water won’t upset the plants on to which it will be chucked. Even with all these measures, it will be a stretch to keep the water consumption down to the 15 (or even 10) litres that the best dishwashers can manage.

Not even a little bit green: doing it the old-fashioned way

To achieve the same effect as a dishwasher, you’ll need plenty of piping-hot water and a constantly running hot-water tap to get a good rinse. Do all this after a big meal and you could be using 150 litres of water and four times the energy a modern dishwasher needs to achieve the same effect.



More information: efficient dishwashers listed at the Energy Saving Trust website, www.est.org.uk, and at www.waterwise.org.uk

Shades of Green: A (Mostly) Practical A-Z for the Reluctant Environmentalist, by Paul Waddington, Eden Project Books, £10.99. Available from BooksFirst at £9.89, free p&p: 0870 1608080


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