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Clean Sleat working group members, have now individually worked out their Carbon Footprints, along with their ideas on how they hope to improve in the future.

and from the Climate Challange Fund newsletter Dec 2009

Clean Sleat: A report from project officer Angus Robertson

A Clean Sleat (pronounced Slate – see what we did there?) is a two year project run by Sleat Community Trust in the south west of the Isle of Skye. Clean Sleat aims to reduce the district’s carbon emissions by 33% by focusing on four key areas: Waste, Energy, Transport and Food.

Clean Sleat has already completed, with aid from students of Flensburg University, Germany, a detailed ecological and carbon footprint study. This showed that our total CO2 emissions were 14,397 tonnes or 17 tonnes per capita. This is around 5 tonnes more than the Scottish

average. The ecological study showed that each Sleat resident uses 5.8 global hectares (gha) of the earth’s resources. Compare this with the people of Malawi who use only 0.6 gha per person.

Why so high? Reasons include a heavy reliance on fossil fuels for transportation and energy, poor home insulation, little recycling (at the start of the project) and, although we have a lot of land, few people grow any fruit or veg. Most people travel long distances every day and

our waste products are taken to landfill in the Scottish central belt, almost 160 miles away.

What have we done so far? Well hold on to your hats!

e have distributed energy saving light bulbs and stand by savers, held crofters’ markets to sell local produce, bought a community Rotovator which is free to hire and carried out around 40 home energy surveys. We have lobbied the local bus company for a better service and held the first Great Sleat Cycle Week featuring a free bike repair workshop, family cycle day and a night time talk by Karen Darke (hand biker extraordinaire). A woodchip supply company has been started and deliveries are made to the local college Sabhal Mor Ostaig. Advice has been given on energy efficiency, insulation, renewables, composting and polytunnels and we have produced two newsletters.

What’s next?

We have plans for a renewable energy event, a green tourism scheme, a bigger and better cycle week, the continuation of home energy surveys, the distribution of eco friendly shopping bags and the start of a car share scheme. It’s been an exciting year so far and much progress has been made.

In the next 12 months we hope to hold the gain and continue to meet our goal of a cleaner and greener society for all of Sleat’s residents.