At home with the nation’s greenest family

I must have got the -address wrong. I am here to meet Britain’s Greenest Family, but instead of a hobbit house in a godforsaken bog, I have pulled up outside a roomy Georgian house, in a well-groomed West Sussex village. There should really be carthorses pulling crusties. Instead, a rather smart-looking lady is hopping out of a white hatchback with a smile.

But this really is the home of the Corts, who this week won the “Britain’s Greenest Family” category in the P E A Awards for sustainability. Neither is this the Corts’ first eco accolade. In March, judges at the WWF Earth Hour Hero awards said: “The Corts might just be the most eco-friendly family in Britain.”

Really, here? “If you look at our house, it doesn’t exactly scream green,” says Carrie Cort. “We’re not living in an off-grid community in the wilds, but I’m devoted to showing people that there are a crazy number of small and easy changes you can make, all of which add up to a huge difference.”

Take the car parked outside, for example. It is electric. When it is plugged in each night, it charges on the home’s electricity, provided by a company that supplies 100 per cent renewable, ethical energy.

“A lot of people assume that to have truly green energy you’ve got to install solar panels or the like,” says Carrie. “But changing to a green energy supplier is as easy as changing your bank account.” Her own supplier, Good Energy, claims that you could cut your carbon footprint in half, just by making that switch. Walking through the house, however, Carrie shows me the other measures they have taken. There’s no composting, long-drop lavatory in her bathroom. Only the eco toiletries hint at what she calls her family’s “obsession” with the environment. But: “the loo is dual flush, and we don’t flush wees unless there are guests in the house.”

The kitchen is reassuringly -familiar, too. The Corts grow their own fruit and veg, and “we try to use the maxim ‘loose and local’ when we buy the rest of our food from local markets or farm shops”, says Carrie.

Sometimes, however, the reality of busy family life gets in the way, and they go to the supermarket. “We just make sure to choose the option that’s as local as possible in minimal packaging,” says Carrie. “She’s a nightmare to go shopping with,” interjects her mother, laughing. But it is common-sense eco hacks like these that earned Carrie’s family their P E A award.

For some, family life is directly antithetical to a truly green lifestyle. Earlier this year, research from Lund University in Sweden suggested that having children is the most destructive thing one can do to the environment, worse than taking aeroplanes, driving a car or eating meat.

“It was actually motherhood that kick-started my eco mission,” counters Carrie. While she has always loved the natural world, she was an air hostess (“One of the least environmentally friendly jobs ever,” she laughs) and then ran a video company with her brother for two decades before her son, Adam, was born nine years ago.

We have plastic toys in the house, but we mostly get them from charity shops

“When he arrived,” she says, “I suddenly had this huge, greater awareness of the kind of planet we’re bringing our children into.” She began going to talks, reading books, watching documentaries and attending green meetings in order to educate herself in the minutiae of green living. In 2014, she quit her job in order to devote herself full-time to her own environmental education initiative, Sussex Green Living.

Today, she organises talks and workshops. She runs a repair café, where people can bring everything from clothes to electric appliances to be fixed. Her recycling programme helps people to divert waste from landfill by collecting things the council will not accept. Toothpaste tubes, for example, which Carrie sends to the Philippines, where a charity turns them into purses.

The whole family has been sucked into her “mission”. Earlier this year, Adam went to the Houses of Parliament to accept his WWF award for a poster he made depicting The Future We Want. Meanwhile Carrie’s mother Jeanie Francis, 78, helps people to organise green funerals.

“Being eco-friendly is definitely harder once you have kids – to begin with,” says Zion Lights, author of The Ultimate Guide to Green Parenting. “Some things, like water usage, just can’t be compromised on. But parents can choose to make other evidence-based lifestyle changes, many of which are easy to do, like composting, using charity shops, travelling by foot, bike or public transport.”

FIVE TIPS FOR BEING A GREENER FAMILY

She adds: “Going off-grid might curb your energy usage, but that’s only one part of the wider puzzle. I don’t think you can be very green if you’re not involved in your community and the wider world.”

Carrie agrees. In some ways, raising a child in an environmentally friendly fashion might be easier if she moved to an isolated spot. “Adam isn’t immune to peer pressure,” she says. “We have plastic toys in the house, but we mostly get them from charity shops.”

The Corts repair and upcycle their clothes. Food is composted, and they don’t iron, tumble dry or even use bin liners. They take low-carbon holidays, but they did once take Adam to Disneyland Paris. “It’s hard,” says Carrie, “because you feel like a bad parent if you deprive them of these experiences, but guilty about the environmental impact if you do.”

“Young children take on board what is modelled at home,” says Rachelle Strauss, whose own family hit the headlines in 2011 after reducing their annual household waste to the size of one carrier bag. “They join in with your behaviour and any lifestyle choices you make are the ‘norm’. But when they get older they naturally begin to question things.”

To that end, Carrie gives workshops and runs clubs at primary schools, making eco art projects or building eco-vehicles out of recycled materials.

“Kids grasp the importance of this stuff so fast,” she says. As we speak, Adam is racing around the garden, building a raft out of junk.

How is he planning to spend his ￡500 prize from WWF, I ask. “We’re going to clean up the school pond,” he says with a grin.

“He gets it,” says Carrie. “Really, it’s him and his friends who fill me with hope for the future.”