One of our aims is to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, but currently Hillside is heated via oil fired central heating. This is stretching the point slightly as the house is pretty thermally inefficient so the heating barely copes and needs supplementing by open fires.
Anyway, getting back to the point, we discovered a couple of weeks ago that the 1000 litre oil tank was only half full, which was a major suprise as we had it filled the day we moved in. There is no way we should've got through that much oil in a month! The smell of oil and obvious signs of leakage around the tank were all we needed to see that we had our own mini-environmental disaster to deal with. There's not much you can do to repair a rusting leaky oil tank - can hardly weld a patch onto it - and hence eco dilemma number 1.
We've been expecting a few eco dilemmas but this one caught us by suprise. Should we replace the tank, knowing that we plan to get rid of oil fired heating in future, and if so should we get another steel tank or a plastic one? As we needed to stop the remaing oil from leaking away, and as our alternative heating options haven't progressed yet it was easy to decide we needed to replace the tank. As for steel versus plastic: steel is more easily recyclable and is not derived from fossil-fuel, Plastic on the other hand will not corrode as quickly.
In the end we decided to go with a second-hand steel tank thus avoiding the use of plastic but also recycling somebody else's cast-off that can be recycled further in future if only for scrap. It's painted bright green but isn't quite what we had in mind when we said we wanted to make Hillside greener...
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