Case Studies

Andrew Taylor

Sunday 17 December

My name’s Andrew Taylor. I live in Ely and I’m a manager at a local well-known finance company. As a rule, I don’t have a lot of time for what I always thought of as this ‘nonsense’ about recycling and saving the Earth.

It never really entered my head; I have to spend my time making money for my family, not embarking on world saving crusades. I live in the real world and I’ve always left that to the green types out there. My son, Ricky, has never been interested either, but my daughter Angela has and she started learning about it at school a few weeks ago.

The last thing I wanted to hear when I got home was a tirade from Angela about how I’m drowning polar bears by leaving the hall light on, it wasn’t so long ago I was always telling her to turn things off. A strange thing happened recently though, Ricky started going on at me to be greener. The boy’s never been even slightly interested in that kind of thing, it’s just football with him, but suddenly he was nagging me.

I figured Angela had got to him but then one night in bed my wife suggested that maybe we could pay more attention to what we waste. Given the pressure, I resolved to look into it and set aside an evening. My wife kept the kids out of the back room while I looked on the World Wide Web for information about it. What I found amazed and disturbed me a little.

To cut a long story short, we now watch what we do. We don’t waste water, heating or food, we recycle everything, which is no hassle at all, plus I calculated we can conceivably save close to £260 a year from this behaviour. I’m telling my staff at work, where I was complaining about it before. We’re having an energy efficient boiler in the New Year and our walls insulated before next winter. The initial outlay will be nothing compared to the eventual savings and not just money-wise.