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'Once I found myself scrubbing the toilet with a toothbrush. At that point, I thought life really is too short'
An hour in the company of Kate Lock is enough to make even the most environmentally aware feel somehow inferior.
It's not just the reusable shopping bags hanging in the hallway of her York home or the pile of wrapping paper saved from her daughter's recent birthday to be used at a later date which prick the conscience of the less virtuous. In the last 10 years the family has flown just once – usually preferring to holiday in Scottish youth hostels – they have not one but three composting bins. She even makes her own moisturiser.
Kate admits she had green tendencies long before it became fashionable but – wary of being labelled some kind of eco-extremist – insists that until two years ago when she accidentally embarked on a mission to reduce her family's carbon footprint, her efforts amounted to little more than a bit of recycling.
"When I was young I wanted to be an environmentalist, but thought the only way you could get into it was through science and I never really had a mathematical brain," she says. "I'm a freelance journalist and a couple of years ago after writing a piece about our efforts to cut down on our household waste, I got a call from a member of York Rotters."
The group was set up to promote composting in the city and, armed with a bin, Kate accepted a challenge to shrink the family's weekly rubbish bag. It didn't exactly go to plan.
"It absolutely stank," she admits. "Every time you opened it you were confronted with a swarm of flies. A few weeks later, one of the group came round to see how I was getting on and said it was possibly the worst compost bin they had ever seen. My husband refused to go near it and it almost became grounds for divorce."
Kate's bin and marriage was saved by fellow York resident John Cossham, who became something of a pin-up for the green lobby after appearing on Panorama's Ethical Man experiment. Thanks to his reliance on a bicycle and a refusal to switch on the central heating, Cossham's family emits less global warming gases into the atmosphere in a year than most average households do in a month.
"He told me I had to take responsibility for the bin, that I had to 'own my compost'," says Kate. "There was a part of me which just wanted him to take it away, but I don't like to lose face and was determined to keep going. With a little help from John I added some more cardboard to the mix and eventually the smell and the flies disappeared and it began to resemble something close to compost. Now we've got three bins and probably throw out less than half a bin bag a week of rubbish."
Buoyed by her at least partial success in the world of composting, Kate decided to set herself a series of challenges to test various environmental myths and see if it was possible for an ordinary family to reduce their carbon footprint without investing in wind turbines and solar panels. First on the list was to break her reliance on supermarkets and to reduce the amount she spent each month on items she neither wanted or needed.
"I was a big shopaholic," she says. "We're really lucky to have a butchers, a bakers and a couple of fruit and veg shops just a minute's walk away, but I'm ashamed to admit I rarely used them. Like my parents, I used to do a big supermarket shop once a week. I never questioned the routine, but I used to come back home exhausted and depressed that I'd bought too much.
"It was hard to change the habit, but I decided that I would shop according to need. I worked out that one supermarket shop was equivalent to 10 trips to smaller shops, but it actually wasn't more effort.
"I found I was popping to the butchers on the way back from dropping my daughter off at school. It just became part of my day. Because I can only buy as much as I can carry, virtually nothing now ends up rotting at the back of the fridge and paying cash, rather than putting everything on a credit card, means I'm much more aware of how much you spend.
"People say that they find it too expensive to shop locally. It's true that a tin of tomatoes will probably cost you more, but if you add up how much you end up throwing away from a big supermarket shop my guess is that it will either balance out or you'll find you're actually saving money. I've stopped noting everything down, but in that first month I saved 138."
Early failed experiments making her own yoghurt taught her that some things are still worth paying for, but while Kate admits that she still shops at supermarkets for household basics, her visits are now limited to once every six to eight days.
"I'm not holier than thou when it comes to being green," she says. "I still can't resist a fabulous pair of shoes and there have been times when I've had to admit defeat. There was one day when I found myself scrubbing the limescale off the toilet with a toothbrush dipped in a paste of bicarbonate of soda. At that point I thought life really is too short.
"It's about getting a balance, some people say Coca-Cola is great at cleaning toilets, but I'm not sure sticking two-and-a-half litres down the pan is any better than using traditional bleach.
"I still wipe around the sink with a lemon and have a mixture of vinegar and essential oils to wipe down surfaces, but there is a danger of your house smelling like a fish and chip shop."
Having just published Confessions of an Eco-Shopper, the story of her two year challenge to go green, Kate's biggest environmental bug bear has been with the beauty industry. After discovering the amount of toxins and chemicals which are often packed into age-defying serums, Kate now makes her own creams.
"The finished products may not have been tested on animals but the individual ingredients may well have been," she says. "We've become more conscious about food labelling and avoid things rammed with additives, but if you take the time to find out what's in a pot of moisturiser it can be equally frightening.
"I don't know whether it's just coincidence, but I used to have an ongoing problem with my immune system and now I feel healthier than I have done."
The book is, she says, a warts and all account of her two-year mission and was written in part as antidote to the usual environmental scaremongering.
"There are hundreds of books on why we must save the planet, but very few on how an ordinary family can actually make a difference," she says. "Most people aren't perfect, but I wanted to talk honestly and I hope with a sense of humour about what worked, what
didn't and the real benefits we have felt.
"It sounds a bit airy fairy to talk of getting back in tune with the natural world, but you get a real sense of satisfaction growing your own vegetables. Al Gore said it's not just about changing the light bulbs, it's about changing the laws, but when I started to make changes in our own house it made me think much more about the bigger picture."
However, when it comes to living a simple more natural life, even Kate has a line which she won't cross.
"Camping, I hate it," she says, finally showing a chink in her armour. "I went for the first time fairly recently and five hours underwater at the Womad festival was just about as much as I could take. We ended up packing up the tent and coming home."
Confessions of an Eco-Shopper, published by Hodder and Stoughton, 12.99, is available to buy through the Yorkshire Post Bookshop on 0800 0153232 or online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.
co.uk. Postage and packing costs is 2.75.
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