How green is my household?

Buying locally

Hi, Hilary here, with news of my New Year's resolution, which was to buy only food that is produced in Australia or New Zealand (I included NZ because it's closer to us here in Canberra than some parts of Australia). I took this decision, and dragged the rest of the family along with me, because at the end of 2007 I was horrified to find that some fairly traded rice I bought - thinking I was doing a good thing - had gone from Thailand to San Francisco before finally arriving on the shelf of the Oxfam shop here in Canberra. I didn't think that any amount of fair trade or supporting good causes like Oxfam warranted that enormous amount of travel. I also checked out the pantry and realised how many things were labelled 'Made in Australia from local and imported ingredients'. 

Of course, only buying local stuff made from only local ingredients does limit what we can eat to some extent. For example, chocolate is out, and we haven't been able to find an Australian brand of coconut milk. Otherwise, we have been able to find most things locally. It helps that we buy a lot of our food from the farmers' market and don't eat much processed stuff. We did hit a crisis this week when Bruce requested spiral pasta shapes and the only local pasta I could find was Beltana Gold fettucine (we're not good at cooking fettucine, it tends to clump together). We're also working our way through local teas (another thing we used to get from Oxfam) to try to find one that we like.

I've persuaded my family to agree to this for three months, which seemed less daunting than going for the whole year. Meanwhile, I haven't been able to stick to last year's resolution to buy nothing new. Already this year I've had to buy a couple of parts for my car and a new tyre for my bike, although I have continued to avoid buying new clothes or books. I've decided that maybe a more realistic approach is to try to make every purchase count. Thus, buying a new part for my car is okay because it's prolonging the life of the car, and the same for the bike tyre. I do feel that I'm at least much more aware of what I'm buying and have found that I get just as much satisfaction (if not more) from second hand things than from new ones.

Spring 2007 power bill

Hi, Bruce here, I've been comparing our power bills for spring 2007 and 2006, and found that in both years, our electricity use dropped by 15%, as did our bill. So, we're continuing the decline in household energy use. However, it isn't quite a fair comparison, because we didn't start our first carbon neutral year until part way through spring 2006. By last summer we were working hard to reduce our energy use, so it will be interesting to see if we can make further reductions this summer. I suspect we might, but only by a few percentage points, certainly not by another 15%.

As the spring bill is the last for the calendar year, I've now got all the figures for 2007, so have created a graph comparing our annual electricity use and cost for the past five years:

Click on image to enlarge

You can clearly see the effect of installing a solar hot water system in April 2004. Overall, we reduced our electricity use by 60% between 2003 and 2007, with daily use going from 25.7 kWh in 2003 to 10.8 in 2007.

The costs are harder to analyse because, since 2005, we've paid a premium to be on 100% green power; also, electricity prices have risen. Despite this, our annual bill has dropped by more than 30%, saving us about $400.

Climate scientists have warned that the world needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 60% of 1990 levels by 2050. As far as stationary energy use is concerned, one house has already achieved that goal, and it only took 5 years, not 60!

Success and more gifts

After writing my previous post about my struggles with the little mud oven, I decided to have another go at fixing it up, so I attacked it with a trowel and managed to hack out a bigger door. This made a huge difference. The fire took with one match (whereas previously I'd used two boxes of matches trying to get a blaze going), and burnt merrily. I kept it burning for about an hour, as the book instructs, then used it to cook a scone. I was amazed that it actually worked, and am now inspired to try insulating this small oven before going on to make the real thing.

Here are some photos of the oven after I'd cut out a bigger door, and the beautifully cooked (actually slightly overdone) scone.

    (click on each image to see a larger photo)

In terms of gifts, I forgot in my last post to mention some of the other interesting things we received. My boss was responsible for the most unusual gift - she gave us some condoms - well, actually she gave them to someone in South Africa on our behalf, through Oxfam Unwrapped, but we thought it was a great idea. My parents kindly gave me a wind-up torch that has no bulb (just LEDs) and no batteries, and a neat little portable solar charger that can charge up mobile phones, MP3 players and other such devices.