Cutting the carbon budget

Cutting down on food waste, stopping draughts, growing some of your own food, cutting down packaging - all of them seemingly trivial things - but if 60 million of us take action on the small things every day it adds up very quickly. We produce 85 million tons of carbon in our homes every year - before we eat or switch on a light bulb - so there is a huge potential saving to be made

• Cutting carbon by just one kilo a week per person would shave 300,000 tons from the UK's annual total domestic emissions.
• Its estimated that improvements in efficiency alone could cut domestic carbon by 75%

  Find out more about carbon

Food

food is a big producer of carbon - its reckoned that around 20% of UK carbon comes from the food we consume - almost 30% if we add in the cost of deforestation

changing the way we think about food can really shrink our carbon footprint

• 30% of food produced in the UK is wasted
• it takes around 2.5 kilos of carbon to put every pounds worth of food in your home

Find out more about food

Energy

At the moment energy = carbon - Every kilowatt of electricity we produce in the UK releases 470 grams CO² - there's more or less a direct link between the amount of energy we use and the amount of carbon we produce. The carbon intensity of our electricity supplies will fall as more and more renewables come on stream and old coal fired power plant is decommissioned - but things like heating and hot water are big carbon emitters - we have to develop our own strategies for cutting energy use - to save money and to cut carbon.

there's a clear choice - invest in energy saving or pay bigger utility bills