Helen Ramsay de Castres is 63 and lives in a small village near Okehampton in Devon. She signed up to Greener Together through the Phone Co-op.
“I’d received a postcard about Greener Together with my phone bill from the Phone Co-op” said Helen. “I’ve already been a greenie for a long time, but I thought it would be fun to sign up, plus I could pick up on the things that I could do better on and have a bit of support. I also thought I might be able to offer something to others too”. But before she could even sign up, Helen had to learn how to use a computer first. “I haven’t used a computer much myself, so I thought it would be good to do a computer course. So, with the help of my tutor, I signed up for Greener Together in my free practice time”.
Green living isn’t something new to Helen – many practices such as recycling and composting – have been part of her life since childhood. “There weren’t many places that you could recycle in Australia when I was growing up, but even so, we used to recycle all our newspapers and take our glass bottles back”. Her parents also used to take their own bags when they went shopping, so that too, was another habit that Helen had inherited from her parents. She already had energy efficient lightbulbs in her house and, last year, bought herself a green car, doing the research beforehand to ensure she bought the best green car appropriate for her lifestyle.
Despite all of this, Helen found that there were still some pledges that she could do. “One of the pledges suggested that you lobby your landlord to replace the boiler for an A grade model” she says. This simple pledge started Helen off on an investigation about her rented property that had greater implications for energy reduction than just replacing the boiler. “My whole house runs on electricity because we don’t have any gas in our area. My house has storage heaters and it turns out that they were probably put in when the house was built back in 1964. Using a carbon calculator and a book that I’d borrowed, I worked out my carbon footprint, which I’d never done before. I’d been meaning to do it for ages and had just been putting off. This led me to look at my electricity bill – which is divided up into day and night time consumption.” What Helen discovered both excited and horrified her. “My day time consumption for the whole year was 600 units, whereas my night time use was 8,900 units”. Because the day and night use was charged differently, Helen hadn’t really noticed the excessive night time energy consumption until that point. “I rang Ecotricity and asked them to look into it. I also did my own research on electricity usage and on alternative methods of heating”. Ecotricity’s research found that the average household used 4,000 units a year on the night-time bill – whereas Helen, living on her own, was using more than twice that, with most of it being used by the night storage heaters. Helen then contacted her housing association and told them the whole story. “Fair Shares Fair Choice campaign recommends a carbon footprint for 2010 of 3.8 tonnes, whereas mine was 7.36 tonnes with 4 tonnes of that down to my storage heating” she told them. As a direct result of Helen’s research and lobbying, the association is now going to install air source heat pumps and replace Helen’s boiler (which wasn’t as inefficient as the heating system). “It looks like I’ll have a hugely lessened carbon footprint as a result of this. And it all started from my pledge to look at changing the boiler”.
Helen’s other pledges included turning off appliances at the wall and to air dry her washing whenever possible. “I don’t have a washing machine” she explains “as I’m not one for owning lots of things; I prefer to use resources that are shared. I go to the laundry once a fortnight, and used to use the dryer. Since signing up to Greener Together, I’ve been only using the dryer for the big things, and I put everything else round the house to dry instead, and bought a drying rack too. It’s working pretty well most of the time.”
Helen’s location means that some of her pledges require a lot more effort to implement. “I’ve been getting a vegetable box for years, but it’s not delivered to my house. It gets delivered to a store about 2 ½ miles away”. On the weeks that Helen is not doing her laundry, she now dons a backpack and walks to the village, putting the vegetables in her backpack and returning home again. “I don’t know if I’ll keep that up through the winter, but that’s what I’ve been doing. All in all it takes about 3 hours”. On top of this, Helen has also been getting the local bus to the nearest town to do the rest of her shopping. “The local bus goes once a week on a Thursday, so I use it to do my shopping, but unfortunately, it’s no good for the veg box as that’s delivered on a Friday”. Helen has cut down on other car journeys by visiting a few friends in one day instead of over different days and by taking the bus to Exeter instead of driving. However, when she’s been driving, she’s also ensuring that she drives with the environment in mind, getting 110 miles to the gallon on a recent trip.
Helen is motivated to keep to her pledges by a love for the planet and a general world view that everything is connected. “I don’t want creatures to suffer, humans to suffer or to be destroying our planet” she explains. “Greener Together’s helped me to do some things that I’ve been meaning to do for ages. It’s a bit of an effort for me to catch the local bus, for example. I’m slack in the morning and I’d rather have a slow morning, so to be up and ready for the morning bus at 10am is a bit of an effort, especially if it’s pouring with rain. But actually, I’m really enjoying it. Apart from the green aspect, it’s been nice to get to know some of the people who use the bus”.
Even though Helen doesn’t have much computer access, she’s still found the Greener Together website helpful and a good resource, especially the pioneer journeys section. “I’ve had some support. I gave someone advice over composting and she gave me some advice back”. Helen made her pledges in late May but won’t be stopping them any time soon. “Everything I’m doing, apart from walking to get my veggie box in the winter, I’ll keep doing. It’ll only get better. My aim is to get my carbon footprint down to the recommended Fair Share Fair Choice level for next year.”
