Carbon Literacy Pledge - Will

I’ll be honest, when it came to choosing a pledge for the Carbon Literacy course, I struggled.  As part of the Made Smarter team I work from home the majority of the time, as advisors we’re in the office one day a month for our team meeting, and we often visit manufacturing facilities all over the North West.  This means that the vast majority of our carbon emissions are generated from travelling to obscure industrial estates in Cheshire, small Cumbrian towns, old mills in Lancashire and Greater Manchester, or factories in Liverpool.  This amount of travel, usually driving, offers scope for a good pledge.  But last year I switched to an electric car, and while there’s still benefit in planning journeys better and checking alternative ways of getting there, it was hard to come up with a firm figure for CO2e savings.

The other elements that make up our emissions are mainly the working from home calculation and IT usage, from things like video calls and sending emails with attachments.  I have a smart thermostat and this does a decent job of keeping our gas usage low, and I felt that because we work from home so much having video on during calls is important for us to keep in touch, so reducing Teams calls didn’t work for a pledge either.

Eventually, I decided to switch to only having vegan or vegetarian food at lunchtime – it gave me something to calculate a saving for and felt simple enough that I’d keep it up.  Based on swapping 200g of chicken or ham for eggs, tofu, or vegetables each weekday there’s a 100kg CO2e saving each year.  And now, looking back over the last few months, it’s had a bigger effect on me than I expected.

At first I relied a lot on halloumi for my lunches, which admittedly isn’t great from a carbon perspective, so I started branching out.  My current favourite is spicy bean burgers, with a bit of salad, gherkins, plant-based coleslaw (it doesn’t taste any different and doesn’t go off as quickly!) in a wrap, bagel, or bread, with whatever random sauce we’ve got in the fridge.

I’m now always on the lookout for new ideas.  If I’m buying lunch in a shop, I’ll go for the plant-based option, this led me to always having some sort of falafel in the fridge.  When I do the weekly shop I’ll add random plant-based things that are on offer, just to see what it’s like, now we often have tempeh in the freezer and use it in stir fries.  I’ve now realised that our evening meals are more regularly vegetarian or vegan, with green lentil dal and Brazilian black bean stew being two dishes that are quick to make, meaning we have them pretty much every week.

It hasn’t all been plain sailing, if there’s bacon in the fridge then I wouldn’t want it to go off and contribute to the food waste problem, so I may as well eat it…  And that Peperami’s waving at me from the shelf in the fridge while I decide what to make, a bit of extra protein won’t hurt…  But on the whole I’ve stuck to the pledge, and in doing so it’s made me generally more conscious of my food-based decisions and their impact on the climate.

Why not calculate your carbon footprint and let us know what one area you pledge to change and submit your carbon footprint results into our tracker.