Stoke Mandeville Hospital Radio - Outrageous Wasters Go Green!

Outrageous Wasters Go Green!

The advert said: family wanted for a new BBC television programme, who were up for a challenge, wanted some fun and an exciting lifestyle change….step forward Mark, Stella & Jak - The Withey Family.

We also knew that the programme would highlight what we as a family could do, to make our lives greener, by recycling, eating home grown and/or organic food produce and also appreciating the things in our lives that we take for granted - food, water & heating.

The filming would last nearly two weeks and would take us on a journey from being 'outrageous wasters' to being a lot greener in our outlook - but after some education in our ways to change our lives and becoming more environmentally friendly to the world that we live in.

The first few days highlighted the 'before' - how we were before the 'friendly' makeover, and like so many other typical families, we were not doing any recycling, and it was all too easy just to throw uneaten meals away with masses of wasteful packaging from across the world, and there was no thought of the gas and electricity we were using or to the pollution of the air due to too many unnecessary journey's in our cars.

For the following 6 days we were sent to a secret location in South Wales, where we would have to live in a yurt (Mongolian shack), looking after pigs, goats & chickens, keeping fires alight for heating and cooking, looking after a vegetable plot and of course, with no creature comforts, such as the TV, radio, or hot running water…all while being filmed 24 hours a day and undertaking tasks as set by the TV production crew. The tasks included searching for edible food on the surrounding land, learning what's recyclable and what's not in our rubbish bins and emptying & distributing waste water, food and bodily wastes back onto the land & delivering our own green manifestos.

Our highlights in South Wales included planting some new trees on the land that we had taken our food from and also managing to keep three fires/stoves going throughout our ordeal. The worst has to be cleaning out the makeshift outside toilets and making logs for the fire out of the fresh animal faeces!

While all this was happening in South Wales, our home on Fairford Leys, Aylesbury was being given an eco-friendly makeover - and the only thing we were told, was that any changes that were being made would be totally reversible but other than that, anything could happen!

On our return, it was the first change that was probably the most striking, as the front of the house was almost totally covered in plants and window boxes (even covering the front door), with an enormous banner stretching from one end of the house to the other, advertising 'Wasters Recycling Plant', this was only the beginning and I'm sure most of the neighbours and passers by couldn't quite believe what they were seeing.

Moving round to the rear of the house we noticed both of our cars had been clamped and replaced by a Twike (a battery operated car) & at the back of the house, the garden had been turned into what can best be described as a colourful kiddies play area, with a Teletubbies recycling plant, a porch built on the back door (to save heat from the house), lots of wheelie bins, a poly tunnel full of vegetable plants, a tortoise pizza oven, three M.O.T's bicycles, a solar panel, a novelty water butt, a wormery and two chickens!

Inside the house we had a number of gadgets including a wind-up radio, energy saving kettle, a recycling bin, a number of organic cleaning products, lots of organic food, energy saving light bulbs and lots of tips on how to save energy around the house, such as turning the thermostat down a couple of degrees. And in return our TV's, DVD and environmentally unfriendly products had been removed.

The experience educated us in how we can save energy, how we can be less wasteful and that home grown organic produce is good not only ourselves but also for the environment. After the filming was completed we ended the journey far more knowledgeable and the whole family had become a lot greener than we had been a couple of weeks earlier. Although the house is now back to normal, we are now using Eco friendly products, recycling our waste, buying organic where possible and we have kept the poly tunnel and are attempting to grow our own vegetables. 'Outrageous Wasters' was shown on BBC 3 in September 2007.