Usually at the BuilderScrap.com offices we’re discussing Free Building Materials and how to get rid of Builders Surplus Supply. We’d like our readers to know we’ve a vested interest in Carbon offsetting and various other environmental projects.

This post from the current defra survey looks at respondents’ attitudes towards carbon offsetting and the types of offsetting schemes that are available. As part of the omnibus survey, the respondents who said they knew a lot or a fair amount about carbon offsetting were presented with three statements about offsetting and asked how strongly they agreed or disagreed with each (on a scale ranging between strongly agree and strongly disagree). Figure 1 summarises responses to these statements and compares these with the findings from the 2007 Defra survey.

Respondents who reported having already used offsetting and who knew a fair amount or a lot about carbon offsetting were presented with one additional statement (‘by making people more aware of how their behaviour affects the environment, carbon offsetting encourages more environmentally-friendly behaviour in other areas of their life’). As so few respondents answered this question, the results for this statement are provided for indicative purposes only – the base size is too low to support meaningful interpretation.

Due to the relatively small base sizes for each of the statements, most of the apparent differences shown in Figure 14 are not statistically significant. However, people‟s attitudes towards carbon offsetting do seem to have become slightly more positive since the 2007 Defra survey. The main significant changes since 2007 are highlighted below.

Compared with 2007, respondents who knew a lot or a fair amount about carbon offsetting, were more likely to agree that ‘I would trust companies offering carbon offsetting to use the money I paid in the right way’ (35% agreed compared with 24% in 2007) and more likely to disagree that ‘carbon offsetting will make no difference to the fight against climate change’ (50% compared with 42% in 2007). Respondents were less likely to agree that ‘carbon offsetting encourages people to carry on doing things that harm the environment’ (44% agreed compared with 57% in 2007). All of these changes indicate that respondents were more positive towards carbon offsetting compared with 2007.

Readers… down your Builders surplus supply.  We’re in a festive mood here at BuilderScrap.com. The turkeys have been purchased and Grandma’s itching to help out with the Christmas Pudding. This post looks at a number of behaviours relating to food purchasing and consumption at home as well as growing your own fruit and vegetables and composting in the garden. Table 22 presents the findings for four food-related behaviours using the stages of change response scale employed throughout this report.

In total almost nine out of ten (88%) respondents reported that they were already wasting less food, with three-quarters (75%) saying they were “already doing this and intend to keep it up” and 13% “already doing this though I’d like to do it more”. This shows an increase since 2007, when less than two-thirds (63%) reported they were “already doing this and intend to keep it up”.

Nearly half (46%) of respondents with a garden reported that they were already composting household or garden waste (the equivalent of 43% of all respondents), with one fifth (20%) having rejected this behaviour and a further one fifth (20%) having either not heard of this or not thought about it. Those who were already composting household food and garden waste included people who had a compost heap or composter at home as well as those who were using composting collections provided by their council. The majority (62%) of respondents indicated that their council provided a collection for garden waste and a third (34%) for food waste. One half (51%) of all respondents who had a garden said they normally used a council collection for garden waste (a slight decrease from 55% in 2007), and one quarter (25%) of all respondents said they normally used a council collection for food waste (an increase from 20% in 2007).

One third (33%) of respondents with gardens reported that they were already growing their own fruit and vegetables (the equivalent of 30% of all respondents), with a slightly lower proportion (29%) reporting that they had rejected this behaviour. One in ten (10%) were contemplating it whilst nearly one fifth (17%) had either not heard of this or not thought about it.

Of the five measures covered in Table 22 respondents were least likely to be already buying fish from sustainable sources and intending to keep this up (only 26% were at the maintenance stage). A large group of respondents (43%) were classified at the pre-contemplation stage – indicating that they had either never heard about this or that they had not really given it any thought. A relatively high proportion (17%) of respondents were left unclassified on this measure, which included just over one in ten (12%) answering not applicable (implying that not all consumers buy fish).