WE LIKE to think of our fashionably small home as the Hoxton Earthship, where we do all those little things that make the world a better place. Here in politically correct Shoreditch, East London, saving the planet comes as naturally as a funny handshake to a Mason. So when we hear that we are to receive a visit from the eco-dominatrix Penney Poyzer, we are quietly confident that our house is already fashionably green.
Penney is travelling — by train, naturally — from Nottingham, where her eco show-home attracts 20,000 visitors a year. In her new BBC Two series, No Waste Like Home, households are given an environmental makeover as their owners learn to use less water, reduce energy consumption, shop ethically, recycle rubbish and save money on the way. Having a stranger go through your bin bags is a bit, well, intimate, I realise too late as the doorbell rings. Should I have tidied the rubbish first?
Yet how smug we feel as Penney admires the maple flooring that we rescued from a gym, and enthuses over the old Chesterfield we found in the street. “You’re not using new resources. There’s no packaging. You’re sourcing locally so there’s no transportation,” says the jolly green domestic goddess. I don’t mention that we are trying only to save money. “My friend Nigel gets all our furniture out of skips,” says Penney. “I do the sewing for him in return.” Ah, yes, barter — a vital part of the eco-lifestyle.
Penney loves the low-energy strip-lights in the kitchen, the double-glazed windows, and — my wife’s pride and joy — the water-saving, Italian twin-flush loos that let you choose a little flush or a big flush (Ken, are you reading?), thereby saving the planet many times every day.
Next, Penney’s assistant uses a thermal camera to take pictures of the outside walls and windows. Penney is impressed: the double glazing is doing its job, and the only heat loss is through the frames around the windows and the letterbox. She advises us to put stick-on insulation strips on the window frames (costing just a few pounds), and wind-proof insulation over the letterbox. I like that idea because I worry that local kids will stick some sort of fruit-picker through the letterbox and pinch our keys.
Examining the rest of our lights, she pronounces that we must change to low-energy bulbs. Timidly I suggest that they are unattractive and might not suit our taste or lighting scheme. But Penney is having none of it: the Philips range of energy-saving light bulbs look identical to normal ones, including energy-hungry downlighters. “You can’t use your dimmers with low-energy bulbs. You will just have to buy extra sidelights,” she instructs.
Then Penney scrutinises our rubbish. Three boxes are installed — one for recyclable paper, tin and cardboard; another for landfill (rubbish that cannot be reused or recycled); the last for organic waste, which can be composted. She tips the first bin bag on to the table: how slippery the slope from eco-virtue to eco-evil. Remnants of a Thai takeaway are filed under organic, tin and cardboard; polystyrene packaging from a baby listener should have been broken up and used when next repotting garden plants, we learn. My wife usually uses broken plant pots as the bottom layer — what is now going to happen to them? And what if we buy a new television? I think I’ll have to invest in some more plants.
The rubbish grows older and nastier: a pineapple goes into the composting section. Then Penney pulls out a couple of empty water bottles. “Why are you using plastic bottles made from oil?” she snaps. “An entire industry has grown up to convince us that we ought to spend pounds on bottled water. It’s just silly.” The bottles are non-recyclable in my area. To add to the list of eco-negatives, they travel the country in giant trucks. Penney explains the concept of food-miles, the distance a product has travelled before it reaches your table (the Israeli carrots, Danish bacon and New Zealand lamb in my fridge adds up to an enormous amount of CO2, it seems).
To my mind, the water bottle issue must be weighed against the fact that London drinking water has been through several other human beings before it reaches me. “There’s nothing wrong with tap water. Use that and save money,” Penney responds. “And if you want chilled water once it’s come out of the tap, fill up some of your huge collection of plastic bottles and stick them in the fridge.” This was her final word on the subject.
She hands me some old tins of dog food to wash out and crush for recycling and notices my crestfallen expression. “Am I being too harsh? Just whack them in old washing-up water overnight,” she says — of course eco-warriors don’t waste water or cleaning fluid on old metal scrap. “Don’t forget, you can recycle your plastic bags as pooper scoopers,” she adds.
As the pile of polystyrene and plastic mounts, so does my anger at the supermarkets, food processors, bottled water brands and dog food canneries for foisting this packaging on us. My self-righteousness is boiling over when Penney’s eye falls on the kettle I am filling. “You are overfilling,” she raps. “Tea for two means two cups of water, no more. Otherwise you are wasting water and wasting energy.” I learn that if everyone did this we would save enough electricity to run the street lighting for the whole country.
I needed retraining, but these are hard habits to break. We use 70 per cent more water than we did 40 years ago — yet if we took showers instead of baths, and switched off the tap while brushing our teeth, we would each save thousands of gallons a year. Meanwhile, every year we flush two billion sanitary products down our loos, which end up in landfill anyway, and therefore should be binned, thus saving a lot of wasted water.
And let’s face it, waste seems outdated in these days of global warming, rising energy bills, GM crops and carbon pollution. Even the Royal Family has hydro-power at Windsor Castle and a wood-chip heating plant at Highgrove. The rest of us should hang our heads in shame: each day we chuck out enough domestic rubbish to fill up Trafalgar Square to the top of Nelson’s Column, and we use enough paper to cut down a forest the size of Wales.
