How green is my household?

Echo versus Prius

Hi, Bruce here. Hilary and I travelled down to Melbourne recently, to visit the Australian Tennis Open and attend a celebration for an Iraqi friend on his becoming an Australian citizen. We made the trip from Canberra to Melbourne by bus, giving us time (8 hours in fact) to catch up on some reading, finish a nagging sudoku and enjoy the scenery. It was a good trip.

At the party, Deb, a friend from Canberra, asked us to drive back with her the next day to share the driving. We agreed, although I confess I would have preferred to be reading on the bus rather than sharing the driving on the busy Hume Highway. However, there was a silver lining, because Deb has a Prius, Toyota's fuel-efficient petrol-electric hybrid car. It was great to drive, but is it a good green investment?

Consider this. Hilary's Toyota Echo (admittedly a little smaller than a Prius) uses 6 litres of fuel/100 km, whereas the Prius uses 4.5 litres. Assuming both cars travel 20,000 km a year, the Echo uses 1200 litres of fuel and the Prius only 900 litres.  So, the Prius is clearly more energy efficient. Using the Australian Greenhouse Office figure of 1 litre of fuel producing 2.5 kg of CO2, then the Prius would produce 2.5 tonnes of CO2 a year, and the Echo 3 tonnes. But then there's the price. A new Prius will set you back $37,000, an Echo $16,000. So, if you bought an Echo, you'd have $21,000 spare. Imagine what you could do with this money to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions.

For $3000, you could install a solar hot water system that could reduce emissions by 5 tonnes a year, while also reducing your electricity bill (at least that's the experience in our 3-person household). This would more than make up for the extra 0.75 tonnes of CO2 emitted by the Echo each year compared to the Prius, and still leave you with $18,000 in the bank. You could use that $18,000 to turn your house into a solar power station by putting photovolatic cells on the roof, reducing your CO2 emissions and power bills even further. As you can also sell excess energy back to the grid, there's potential to be making money from the cells in the long term.

There is no doubt that the Prius is energy efficient compared to other cars of its size, but if you have $37,000 to spend and want to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions, buying a Prius is probably not the best option.

Not so resolved

Hi Hilary here. It seems I spoke too soon in my previous blog about our resolution to buy only food and drink that originated from Australia or New Zealand. It turns out this was my resolution, not ours, and Bruce just couldn't do without little curly pasta from Italy, licorice and fennel tea from who-knows-where but packed in the UK, and nutty chocolate. At least the last two items were fairly traded, so a poor farmer somewhere benefited from the purchase. I also have to admit to cheating - I'm still drinking hot chocolate at work, even tho' I've given up buying it for home. 

What has been encouraging is the range of local foods that I've found since I started taking this seriously (and I'm particularly pleased to see from Rebecca's comment that truly Australian chocolate will be available soon). I've discovered several brands of locally made pasta, the cheese-seller at our local farmers' market has Australian-made red and white wine vinegar at a very reasonable price, and our health-food shop has a wide range of Australian herbal teas.