Tuesday 31 January 2012

Weekly update #2

Yes, the weekly update is back. A bit quiet this week, but still there.

- Money moving - I've been meaning to move my bank account to a more ethical bank for years (I've always been with Natwest), but still haven't done it. Occupy Bristol encouraged people to do it at the end of last year, and their campaign has now spread into Move Your Money month, which will take place in March. And so that's when I'm going to move my money. I need to do some more research to decide where I'm moving to, but at least I have a time frame now...

- Useful tool - This tool lets you look at your journey and work out whether it's better to go by train, car or coach. It surprised me that the coach was better than the train, as is a car with 5 passengers. I'm going to do a bit more research into the figures they use though.

- The car saga continues - Turns out my car isn't dead. So car sharing is off the agenda immediately, but I'm going to look into it again once I've moved house (since I'll be sorting things like insurance changes there anyway). What the whole thing has made me do is loosen my emotional attachment to my car - a few months ago I would have been very precious about anyone else driving it, and now it seems like a fairly easy step. I've also ridden my bike a lot more over the last couple of weeks when I didn't have access to my car, even doing a couple of journeys by bike that I would have previously driven. So I'm definitely going to try and consider cycling journeys like those rather than driving in the future...

- Milk follows chicken - A few years ago, my friend Em took me to an organic dairy to learn how to milk cows (it's a long story). The whole experience really stuck with me - the cows were so happy and well looked after that it made a real impression on me, and one that contradicts a lot of evidence I've seen about a lot of large scale dairy farming. Added to that, research has now shown it's better for you. I've recently discovered that a local corner shop sells organic milk, so I now have no excuse for not buying it. So only buying organic milk follows the free-range chicken commitment.

- Supermarketless life - I'm still managing ok (apart from the issue with feeding 30 people at the weekend). I've hit my first couple of problematic areas though, and one really surprised me - wine. Turns out most of the wine I buy comes from the supermarket - in fact, my favourite red wine is a Tesco Finest wine. There's so few decent off licenses around that I've been buying fairly average wine from my corner shop. I think this might call for some further investigating...

- Boxes of vegetables - I've ordered my first veg box, and it's arriving on Thursday. Exciting times!

1 comment:

  1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2012/feb/10/ethical-bank-account?intcmp=122

    have a look at this ref moving your money - helpful summary of options

    ReplyDelete