ANNA Pitt’s wheelie bin is more or less redundant. In a year all she has thrown into it is a few broken drinking glasses.

“You cannot recycle a broken glass,” she told me, rather apologetically.

“It goes in the same category as crisp packets, sweet wrappers and disposable razors – oh, and polystyrene cups, I hate them. They should be banned. It’s ludicrous to make things that aren’t recyclable.”

At least Anna has found a use for empty crisp packets – she uses them as kindling for her wood-fuelled cooker, which dates back to the 1950s.

“We did go through about a year of boycotting crisps, but with two teenage girls that was extremely difficult – so now we use the packets as firelighters.”

The wood for the cooker, and the cottage’s two wood-burning stoves, comes from trees in the family’s paddock.

“We have wood-piles all over the place – it takes three years for the wood to dry out, so we have to keep track and rotate our usage accordingly,” said Anna, 46, a computer analyst whose life has become increasingly influenced by her eco-conscious lifestyle.

She is passionate about encouraging others to reduce their carbon footprint and writes and lectures on the theme, being in constant pursuit of ways to live leaner and greener.

Anna lives with her husband Richard, who works in pharmaceuticals, at a cottage near Lew.

They have two daughters: Lizzie, 19, who is studying for a maths degree, and Jen, 17, who is planning to study medicine. Money raised from electricity generated by solar panels on the roof is helping to put the girls through university.

“We have oil-fired heating, so it’s very expensive and not at all carbon-friendly, so we use it as little as possible,” said Anna.

“Using our own wood for the wood-burners brings the cost down considerably and, because we have a huge south-facing roof, we have solar panels which generate electricity – we get paid for any we don’t use ourselves through the Feed In Tariff (FIT) scheme.

“Both our daughters are doing university degrees, Lizzie for four years and Jen for six years.

“Over the years I had saved £12,000, which was just sitting in an ISA in a building society earning next to no interest – and it would be nowhere near enough to fund the girls’ higher education, so we decided to invest in solar panels.

“They regularly generate £600 per quarter, and they were exceptionally productive last year, when we had such a good summer.

“Even though the FIT scheme has been cut back now, there are still some grants available. I still think if you have a nest egg it’s worth investing in solar panels – you will get the money back in 10 years.”

Anna’s recycling crusade is particularly impressive, and she is always on the look-out for ways to do even more via the suggestions she receives through her blog and via Twitter.

The day I visited her she had been to the Woodford Way car park in Witney to pop some computer games, DVDs and videos into a Salvation Army recycling bin. She also showed me a bag of batteries and lightbulbs, and another containing broken small electrical items, such as hairdryers and kettles, which were destined for dedicated recycling bins at the Sainsbury’s supermarket in Witney.

She recently found out that Origins cosmetics, which has a counter at Debenhams in Oxford, will accept any kind of cosmetic packaging to recycle.

“This is a brilliant scheme,” said Anna. “I’m going to see if they will take old mascara and deodorant cans and that kind of thing too.

“My daughters always bring bags of bits to me – they know they’re not allowed to chuck things in the bin.”

Lizzie and Jen have been brought up to embrace their parents’ beliefs, including such measures as reducing the time they take to shower.

“I asked them to cut their showers down from about eight minutes to four minutes,” Anna said.

“It’s difficult for teenage girls when they’re washing their hair and so on – but the water savings are huge.”

Her eco-conscience took root as a young child, when she and her family went on holiday to Wales and visited the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth.

“It’s up on a hillside and it is a fantastic place. Things like a radiator painted black, which generated the heat to boil a kettle, just captured my imagination, and my dad’s too.”

Her father Barry Layfield lives in the cottage next door.

Anna said: “He always wanted to build his own windmill to generate electricity, but it never happened. But I remember various things like the drought of 1976 when he use old bicycle inner tubes to pump bathwater out onto the vegetable garden.”

It is not quite like The Good Life at the Pitts’ home, but Anna grows some vegetables, such as tomatoes, aubergines and salad leaves (which statistics show end up in the bin more often than any other food) and herbs.

She has considered keeping chickens, but hasn’t taken the plunge as yet, and she buys some things in bulk – toilet rolls, kitchen roll, olive oil and so on, but only if it reduces the amount of packaging used too.

A confirmed hoarder, Anna spent last summer having a massive household clear-out and gave away 80 bags of unwanted items to charity, or for recycling.

But she saves and reuses as much as possible. She is also into ‘swishing’ – swapping clothes, or buying secondhand.

“I committed to a year of this, and I don’t think I could ever go back to buying from the high street,” she explained.

“I find it more creative and I can buy way more clothes, because it’s so much cheaper. I’ve got rid of lots too. I have a whole new wardrobe.”

Her most recent project took 12 weeks and was devoted to achieving a paperless home office.

She particularly enjoys running ‘Waste Not’ and ‘Dustbin Diet’ workshops at secondary schools in Oxfordshire.

She said: “There’s a lot of work being done at primary schools on waste reduction and recycling, but I could see there was a gap at secondary schools.

“I have been working with 12 and 13-year-olds and the response has been phenomenal. They have some really cracking ideas.”

Anna has written a book called 101 Ways to Live Cleaner and Greener for Free and is working on two more.

Her blog rosiesecoblog.blogspot.co.uk is also full of interesting advice and observations about recycling and cutting out waste.