The Good Life

There’s been a couple of programmes on telly recently attempting to tackle the issue of being ‘green’.

BBC Three have a series called Outrageous Wasters, in which a family who use more energy and water, make no attempt to recycle and have little concern for the environment are taken away to live in a yurt in Wales and be shown green alternatives and made to think about the impact their lifestyle has. Meanwhile their house is modified with solar panels and fun ways of sorting recyclables to try and help them consider continuing this new outlook when they return home.

I’ve been quite impressed with the series so far (and quite shocked at how wasteful some people can be). It’s been interesting to watch the change in people’s attitudes to realising that it’s not really difficult to make some basic changes to their lifestyle, but more importantly how everyone doing their little bit can make a big difference.

Over on Channel 4 there’s been a short series called Dumped. This programme took a group of volunteers and asked them to live on a dump next to a landfill site for three weeks. A good premise with lots of potential for looking at how much of what we as a country throw away is actually useful. Unfortunately the programme makers made it a competition with the person or people lasting the full three weeks getting a share of the prize money. This meant that the programme was more interested in the disputes between the people than it was on considering the issues it should have been highlighting (They were there, but well hidden). So I only managed to watch a couple of episodes before giving up.

It had so much potential.