Homes & Garden
28 November 2011
Christmas can be both merry and sustainable. It can also be both miserable and sustainable. The important thing, though, is that it should be … sustainable. If you are in the midst of your Crimble preps, halt now and read just how you can have a happy / unhappy Christmas while not setting back Scotland’s sustainable development targets with an orgiastic spree of super-aggrandised consumption. Santa, Rudolph and the elves may not be happy with our advice – but they belong to the carbon-spewing, resource-gobbling Christmases past. Where are you, Ebeneezer Scrooge, now that we need you?
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Sometimes – well, quite often – when you buy a book which quotes a series of rave reviews from seemingly trustworthy sources, it fails to live up to the heightened expectations. So how pleasant to have just read a book, which in every way justifies all the praise that has been heaped upon it. It is as compulsively readable, accessible, informative (often counter-intuitive), entertaining book as I’ve come across. I found the title not particularly magnetic, indeed a bit off-putting. But you can’t, as they say, judge a book by its cover – though sometimes you certainly can (eg if the personal name – author may be a misleading term – displayed is Katie Price or Jeffrey Archer).
Dead lambs, chicken carcasses, waste food, briquettes made from copies of the Sunday Telegraph, whisky barrels, wellington boots, Japanese knotweed, old teabags mixed with sawdust – not to mention soiled nappies, railway sleepers, telegraph poles, plastic bottles, old wood pallets, unwanted shoes and clothes. What do all of the above objects have in common? According to a study commissioned by a manufacturer of wood-burning stoves, these are all being increasingly burnt in wood-burning stoves.
In August 2010 Scotland’s Housing Expo took place at Inverness, featuring the green, environmentally-friendly, energy-saving houses of the future. 52 real houses there were, and are. 28 were built for local housing associations and eight were funded directly by developers. The remaining 24 were to be sold off to guinea pig owners, the proceeds of which were to offset the cost of staging the Expo which was backed by £10 million of public (ie taxpayers’) money. So far, so good.
Are you ready to take action during a flood? Are you ready to avoid floods of tears in the event of an inundation. These flooding events are becoming more frequent and more widespread. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) has a service called Floodline Warnings Direct which will deliver flood warning messages free to registered landlines and mobiles. For example, "wotch it mate, there's a flood-a-coming your way pronto, innit".