December 28th 2006, Our House, Derby
Now we know that our cars produce, what in old money is, around 7 3/4 tons of CO2 each year.
Most of our driving is to and from work. Sadly, as much as we would like to not work we don't have any alternative. Apparently you don't get paid if you don't go!
We also don't really have the option of using public transport, mainly cos it just doesn't exist where we live. Living in Derby and working in Leeds (at the time this was written anyway) doesn't help either.
Maintenance
Didn't really need to do anything here as neither of our cars are particularly old, the Cooper is a 53 plate and the A4 is an 05. We have always had our cars serviced and regularly check things like the tyre pressures as under inflated tyres use more fuel.
Sharing
Certainly for the remainder of this current contract, I will continue to car share with Peter Cox. That's the same Peter that has insanely decided to let me race his Westfield in the 2007 WSCC Speed Series.
It also means there is only one car making the trip rather than two. It wasn't uncommon to find us following each other down the motorway. Clearly ridiculous!
And it keeps a huge chunk of miles off my car, which is leased and will have a whole load more miles on it than I told them it would do when I hand it back.....
Fuel
Whenever possible we fill our cars up with BP Ultimate. Don't get any ideas that we are brand snobs cos we're not. Its BP cos the petrol station we use round the corner from our house is BP. Its that simple.
It may cost a little bit more but does, if you believe the advertising
guff, produce lower emissions (mainly lower Carbon Monoxide) than normal Diesel
and Petrol, better mpg and a few more horses from the engine.
Cant really say much about the emissions side of things but we do seem get 2 or 3 miles per gallon more and a little bit more power. Oh and the Audi diesel doesn't seem to produce as much smoke when it first starts up.
Off Setting
The only real option we have is to cancel out our emissions by supporting projects that reduce the equivalent amount of CO2.
There are numerous websites that you can do this with but we choose Target Neutral because:-
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The emissions calculator was simple to use.
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Our contributions will be invested in various projects around the world that prevent or remove an equivalent amount of emissions from the atmosphere.
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Target Neutral is a non-profit initiative run by BP. As BP is such a huge company we thought the chances of our money going into some dodgy fellas own pocket rather than actually being used properly where slim.
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When Target Neutral members with a Nectar Card, which we have, fill up at a BP station an extra 10p per tank of normal fuel and 20p per tank of Ultimate will be contributed. As Kev still spends a lot of time filling up it seemed like a good way of contributing even more.
What is surprising is how little
it actually costs to off set the crap coming out of our cars.
Having gone through the process of setting up our Target Neutral account, which includes the members pack with appropriate and never to be used car stickers, we are paying just £3.20 a month.
The scores on the doors
Now we have off set our car emissions our graph now looks like this.
What else we plan to do?
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Look at ways to off set the CO2 produced by our cars.
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Look at ways to reduce our gas consumption.
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Look at ways to reduce our electricity consumption.
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Look at ways to reduce our water consumption.
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Work out what our Carbon Footprint is after we have done the above.
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Find out how to recycle more and monitor just how much we do.