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What do they do about another component of their carbon footprint,
transport?
The purpose of living in central Oxford was to reduce commuting
and other transport needs but circumstances can change.
I'd worked at the local city council for five years
and that was a walk to work.
I've stopped working there now so now I'm looking at other jobs
and I don't know whether
I'm going to be taking public transport or driving.
I was working in central Oxford and I could walk to work
and I'm now working in Abingdon which is seven miles away
and looking at options for cycling. At the moment I take the bus.
Sometimes Alice has to drive to work
because she needs to travel between two sites.
Having planned to live where they could walk to work,
Mark and Alice may have to commute by car some of the time.
But at least they own a hybrid car, the Preus.
Its fuel efficiency is equal to the best small diesel car.
We needed anew car and Mark was very keen
to get one that was very energy efficient
and this one had just come out.
The government was also giving grants towards the purchase of them.
It has an electric motor and a petrol engine.
It uses them both and determines which is the most efficient to use
at which time.
You don't have to think about it, you just drive.
The Preus is a mid-priced family saloon
but its petrol plus electric hybrid drive saves on fuel and emissions.
The electric motor's batteries are charged either by the engine
or when going downhill or braking,
recovering energy that would be lost as heat.
The car achieves 55-63 miles per gallon
and road tax is a fraction of the norm.
So if you must have a car,
a hybrid is one of the more sustainable options.
The third main contributor to Mark and Alice's carbon footprint
is their food.
Growing and transporting food generates large amounts of emissions.
We read a book, 'The 100-Mile Diet',
and that was of a couple who tried to only eat things within 100 miles.
We don't do that, we do buy things
but what we do say is if it's in season and it's available locally
we try and do that and we buy through a bulk scheme.
But occasionally we'll buy things like bananas
which are not grown in Britain.
When we produce food we're using energy to produce it
to make fertilisers, to transport goods around the world.
So those are quite energy-intensive things
and you're using water to irrigate crops as well.
So it makes sense to think about some of the things you're eating.
Animal products are particularly intensive sources of CO2
and other emissions.
So are Mark and Alice vegetarians?
We eat meat and we eat fish
but what we have tried to do is be a bit more measured.
So we don't eat vast amounts of meat.
We buy carefully so we'll buy food that's been ethically sourced
and locally sourced.
Eight slices of the smoked back bacon.
I do think that a lot of food, particularly in supermarkets,
is over packaged.
Partly because we buy from independent retailers
a lot of the time, they will reduce the packaging.
It's better rather than to recycle things,
just not to use them in the first place.
So the idea that you reduce first, you reuse second
and you recycle third.
With all these changes Mark and Alice have succeeded
in making major reductions in their carbon footprint.
But there are dilemmas
that face even the most environmentally-committed family.
We have relatives in Canada and if you go to see them
you end up travelling.
And all the energy that we've saved in this house
is more than offset by the energy use in those international flights.
International flights are terribly energy intensive.
So our carbon footprint
is not as low as it really could be or perhaps should be.
While there's no easy alternative to flying to Canada,
for other trips there are options.
Just recently we've been to Amsterdam on the train.
We've been to the south of Spain by train.
When we have to travel,
we try and identify the lowest energy impact way of travelling
but we also are balancing that
with the realities of living in the 21st century.
Of course when you think about carbon footprints
the really big changes have to happen at government level
and others at community level.
But as individuals we can still make a difference.
What we've found is showing people some of the benefits of the house,
the fact that it's quiet, it's warm, it doesn't use very much energy,
that choices that we've made mean that we don't have long commuting,
that our lifestyle is better as a result of this
and that it is something that people can do practically,
people are attracted to that.