Getting to the Bottom of the Good Life

John Cossham

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By Chris Benfield

IF he is not the greenest man in Britain, he must be a contender.

For the past 20 years John Cossham, of York, has made a point of finding a new way to reduce his environmental impact every year, starting long before it was generally accepted that the burning of fossil fuels was warming up the planet and threatening disaster.

It all started when he dropped out of university at the age of 18.

He became a vegetarian and then started growing his own vegetables. Gradually, he began turning most of his own waste into compost.

Now he says, he and his wife and two children put less global warming gas into the atmosphere in a year than the average household does in a month.

He has, of course, no car and no mobile phone and never switches on the central heating.

He rides a bicycle and once a week he uses that and a trailer to pick up 100 kilograms of damaged organic fruit and vegetables, from shops in York, which he takes home for his compost heaps. He recommends an "ethical supermarket" called Out Of This World, which has branches in Leeds and York.
He allows his wife and two boys, nine and seven, to use the lavatory in their semi-detached house on Hull Road, York but he prefers to use a commode and feed the contents into a dedicated composting bin, along with damp sawdust, as recommended in a book called Humanure, by Joe Jenkins. The sawdust comes from the logs he cuts for two stoves in the house.

When the mix is ready, it feeds cucumber vines, raspberry canes, apple trees and other plants on which the fruit grows well away from the ground – just a precaution, he says, because the composting process kills any bugs.

Tonight he will be revealed as one of the advisors who helped BBC reporter Justin Rowlatt cut his impact on the planet, and his household budget, over a year for Newsnight. Tonight's edition of Panorama, Go Green Or Else, will sum up Mr Rowlatt's experience and introduce Mr Cossham as his composting expert for his Ethical Man experiment.

Mr Rowlatt said: "He is, quite literally, the King of Compost. He filled me with enthusiasm for making my own, but I didn't actually try the Humanure process, because my wife drew a line."

Mr Rowlatt and his wife and three children saved more than £2,500 over a year of greening their lifestyle.

Mr Cossham has done a bit more than that.

When he is not working on his garden or his allotment, he works part-time as a children's entertainer called Professor Fiddlesticks. He also earns a little as a composting consultant and claims Family Income Supplement to take his income up to about £15,000 a yea. Their electricity bill, from renewable sources, is £200 a year.

Mr Compost's top tips

Build a compost heap in layers, with dry brown stuff on wet green stuff.

Tip urine in to help keep it active and to save energy and chemicals at sewage works.

Use it to grow pumpkins, which keep well through the winter and make nice soup and fried slices.

Cooked food attracts rats unless you treat it with a Japanese preparation called bokashi.
Last Updated: 05 March 2007