How green is my household?

The end of our CN year is near!

Hi, Bruce here, back after a lengthy break working on other projects. Our first carbon neutral year ends on September 30, so it’s time to calculate our emissions for the year. Some of this will be easy, but most will not!

It’s fairly simple to calculate emissions associated with use of electricity and natural gas, and travel by car and plane, because these things are easily measured. Also, there are several online calculators that will do it for you — just feed in the data and press the button.

More challenging is the calculation of emissions associated with food and drink consumption, goods purchased and services used. I have found only one Australian calculator that attempts to do this, developed in the mid-1990s by Prof Manfred Lenzen, from Sydney University’s Centre for Integrated Sustainability Analysis.

Prof Lenzen estimated that a massive 37% of our personal emissions come from the goods we purchase and the services we use. A further 17% comes from our food and drink consumption. However, Lenzen’s calculator for these items is based on their cost. As costs have risen considerably since the 1990s, the figures he gives need to be corrected, as I discussed in my June14 blog titled ‘Positive thoughts’.

The other problem is getting the expenditure figures. Basically, you need to record every dollar you spend against an emissions category. I intend to do this for our second carbon-neutral year, but it’s something we missed this year, and doing it retrospectively is difficult, as I found when I tried to sift through credit card statements, cheque butts, BPay statements, etc. Even if you know where the money went, the process can still be complicated; for example, a bill for a car service or an electrical repair is partly for goods and partly for services.

You also need records of cash payments, such as purchases at the Farmers Market where we do most of our shopping. Then there are goods and services you use but don’t pay for, such as bulk billed medical treatments. They slip through the net.

Donations to charities are another tricky one, as you don’t know exactly what the money will be used for.

The good news is that Prof Lenzen’s calculator is being updated, so hopefully the new version will address some of these issues. I have been sending comment on my experience with the older version to his colleagues, to provide some user feedback.

Guilt-free reading

Hi, Hilary here. Regular readers will have noticed that the blog has been a bit quiet of late. That's mainly because we've been overwhelmed by other things, such as contributing to the Siev X memorial, trying to stop feral deer from destroying our efforts at revegetation, and preparing for the one-day course (Practical steps to a green home and garden) that we're running at the end of October.

In response to a post where I mentioned buying second-hand books on eBay, someone suggested we try using the local library. As our property is 12 km from the nearest shop, and about 20 km from the nearest library, we don't exactly have a 'local' library, but our Saturday trip to the farmers' market takes us near to the Dickson Library, so I recently signed up. It's a great service, you can have up to 30 items out at a time, order items online and have them delivered to the library of your choice, and even download audiobooks directly from the site.

So now, if there's something I particularly want to read, I just order the book or CD from the library, rather than combing through op shops or eBay. Obviously, there are still some carbon dioxide emissions related to the library service - to heat and light the library, run the computer system, transport the books from one library to another, etc. However, I'm sure they are much less than those associated with buying a new book, or even buying a second-hand book on eBay (which then has to be packaged, posted, etc). So, I'm now enjoying guilt-free reading, and saving money at the same time.