climate changeGreengreen livingimagesolar panels

How Can the UK be Greener?

There are countless charts and tables that index the quality of a nation’s green policies, what they may do in the future, and how badly they’ve done in the past, but one of the biggest is the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), last conducted in 2012.

This index looks at everything from carbon emissions to climate change policy, as well as anything regarding fishing, air, disease control and a lot more elements to give the fullest and most comprehensive result.

UK ‘Not Bad’

The EPI 2012 looks at 132 nations, with Switzerland, Latvia and Norway at the top and Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iraq at the bottom. The United Kingdom is ranked 9th on the list. Being in the top 10 categorises the ‘strongest performers’ in the world, so it really isn’t bad, nor it is an indication of which are the more developed countries, as the USA ranks at 49 under ‘modest performers’. Nevertheless, there is definitely opportunity to do better than 9th on this list. We will come to how these ranks are decided later, but as a rough indication, there is only 0.18 points between the UK and the three above them, Italy, Austria and France- 7.82 from 1st place.

How can that be improved?

As this rating is all based on government policy and rates of ecological and human diseased, there aren’t massive things that can be done by the individual at first glance, there is definitely room to help them out by working with the green policies the government introduces.

A lot of these things can be done by improving your home for greener living. Things like insulation, solar panels and new, ecological window solutions can mean that they can show the successful results of these policies and start introducing new and even greener ones.

The price of implementation

There’s a difficult line when choosing to insulate your home and make it greener. The initial cost and amount saved depends on specifically what you’re doing. For example, solar panels can cost around £7000 to install, but enable you to sell your electricity back to the grid, as well as saving the cost of buying some. Estimates say that savings can top £600 per year. Specially insulated windows like the UPVC windows from Anglian Home can save thousands of pounds over a 10-period. Obviously the cost of these is large too, but they seem like a worthy investment if you think you’ll be staying in your home for a long time.

Clay Miller
the authorClay Miller
I am the creator/writer of Ways2GoGreen.com and Ways2GoGreenBlog.com. I'm an advocate for oceans, beaches, state parks. I enjoy all things outdoors (e.g. running, golf, gardening, hiking, etc.) I am a graduate of the University of Kentucky (Go Wildcats!!). I'm also a huge fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers. I was born and raised in the beautiful state of Kentucky.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.