www.everythingsgonegreen.co.uk

BBC2 last night broadcast the first episode in the new series of It’s Not Easy Being Green.

I missed the first (and second) series but have been on an economy drive recently, so staying in and watching TV has been the order of the day.

Whilst the programme is a great attempt to promote green lifestyle ideas you have to question the scale of the operations they demonstrate in relevance to your average Joe. (It’s similar to the way furniture companies try and flog you a new corner sofa by showing it in an awesome setting – you get the sofa home and then realise it takes up all of your living room)

Dick Strawbridge, the show’s presenter, uses his home in Cornwall to convert to and demonstrate green lifestyle changes. The difference between my own humble abode, a very average British 3-bed semi, and Dick’s home is that he owns a huge farm with a massive farmhouse & outbuildings.

• His solar panels, to make him totally self-sufficient on electricity, are not cheap. Even with a £2,500 energy-efficiency grant he’s still forking out £12,500. And because Dick owns a farm, the panels are installed on the south-facing roof on one of his numerous outbuildings.
• The composting toilet is great and lucky enough to be in its own decent-sized shed in the back garden, somewhere in the tract of land occupied by Dick’s farm.
• Growing your own veg is a great green idea and even more beneficial if your vegetable plot is far bigger than the average British back garden
• Dick traded his Audi convertible for a Land Rover diesel that he runs on home-produced bio-diesel from chip fat. The lucky blighter has a barn in which he has his own bio-diesel factory
• The eco swimming pool on the show was in the grounds of a rather grand country cottage and cost £100,000.
• The couple featured on the show who were doing up a Victorian house in London had a budget of £100,000 to “green” their property.

So, as you can see, going green or being green seems to be beyond the reach of your average British household. Without a huge acreage of land, a farm with a shed, a barn, at least one building with a south-facing roof and more than £10,000 spare cash to spend, the show is jam-packed with green solutions that the overwhelming majority of us can only dream about. The green lifestyle they preach appears, sadly, beyond our grasp. Only the rich and the landed gentry can afford to go green, according to this show.

But wait, am I being a little bit harsh? Maybe. They did a quick feature on deodorising crystals. We wrote about one brand available, Crystal Spring, a couple of years back. So rejoice, wannabe greens of the UK, for just £5.49 (inc P&P) direct from the Crystal Spring website, you CAN go green. At least in your armpits anyway.

One thing that was free is the WWF’s footprint calculator which they test a celebrity on every week, and this week it was cricketer Phil Tuffnell who got tested with his hunger for 3.97 planets compared to Dick’s 2.4. We’re a 1.35 so even without a composting toilet, PV panels, home-grown veg, bio-diesel car and no wood-burner (yet) we’re doing better than the green man. During the show the amount of activity on the footprint calculator shot up and there were loads of people online which is good to see.

Episode 2 of It’s Not Easy Being Green is on BBC2 next Wednesday, 14^th January, at 8pm or you can catch it on BBC iPlayer for the next 55 days (from today).

Whilst most of the ideas on today’s show were not for the common man (especially not during an economic crisis) you can at least aspire to them, dream about them if you will. But the wealth-gap issue between those who want to/need to & should go green and those that can afford to go all the way inspires us here to do more “going green on a shoestring” stories.

For more down-to-earth tips, check out the WWF footprint calculator, sign up for an account and be sure to act upon all the little eco tips they suggest.