How green is my household?

Summing up our first CN year

Hi, Bruce here. Having completed our first ‘carbon neutral’ year — yes, there will be a second one! — it’s time to do some number crunching to see how we fared.

Fortunately I recently found a new online carbon calculator ( from the Department of Environment and Water Resources (DEWR). Sydney University’s Centre for Integrated Sustainability Analysis developed the formulas to run the calculator.

The calculator is very comprehensive, covering all personal emissions, including goods and services. This is important as these account for a large part of our emissions, but are often left out of calculators (maybe because they are difficult to measure).

To work out what I’d spent on goods and services I checked every credit card statement, every bank statement and cheque butt for the past year and allocated expenditure to categories, which was quite a process. However, the DEWR calculator works on a household basis, which requires all occupants to keep expenditure records and then pool them. It’s hard enough for one motivated person to do this; trying to get several people involved is near impossible (particularly when one of them is a teenager).

My expenditure analysis at least gave me a ballpark figure to work with, and I just estimated Hilary and Becky’s contributions. I intend to refine these figures during our second carbon neutral year.

The good thing about having a goods and services category in the DEWR calculator is that it raises our awareness of how significant this expenditure is in generating greenhouse emissions.

Here is a summary of our greenhouse emissions for the year, from the DEWR calculator.

Item	Tumbleup - tonnes CO2-e	Tumbleup – ex plane emissions	Tumbleup – ex all transport
Food	1.86	1.86	1.86
Organic waste	0.0	0.0	0.0
Other waste	0.123	0.123	0.123
Electricity and gas	0.05	0.05	0.05
Transport (non plane)	9.00	9.00	0.00
Plane	11.28	0.00	0.00
Goods - new	0.95	0.95	0.95
Clothing - new	0.19	0.19	0.19
Goods – 2nd hand	0.085	0.085	0.085
Services	1.16	1.16	1.16
Total	24.7	13.4	4.4

As you can see, we emitted 24.7 tonnes of CO2 equivalents, which is more than the NSW household average of 20 tonnes.

Transport is our problem. Plane emissions made up 46% of our greenhouse gas total, due to a one return flight to London for Hilary and Becky (on a trip to visit family, travel now referred to as ‘love miles’!).

Transport emissions as a whole account for 86% of our total — a result of the combination of love miles and the fact that we live out of town and have no access to public transport.

To be carbon neutral, we now need to offset, absorb or reduce 24.7 tonnes of CO2 equivalents. As Hilary has mentioned in previous posts, that’s a thorny issue, but I’ll grapple with that in my next post.

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.

New Year's resolution

It’s New Year’s Eve so time to think about resolutions. Rather than the usual stop smoking, lose weight or exercise more, this year there is a global issue of far greater importance than sorting out personal foibles.

The Stern Report, the Al Gore movie, and climate scientists around the world are warning that we need to act now to avoid dangerous climate change. In view of this, a good resolution would be to reduce personal energy use by 10 percent. It’s quite challenging, but when you consider that your kids and their kids will be the beneficiaries, then it’s a challenge worth taking.

A 10 per cent reduction this year, followed by 5 percent next year, and 3 percent thereafter, will have you well on the way to an energy efficient lifestyle – and you will be saving money as well, to spend, of course, on sustainable goods or services.

The way we started was to calculate our emissions, so we would have a base figure to work from. We looked at several calculators in earlier posts, though most are limited to emissions that can be easily measured – power, petrol and air miles. The Greenhome eco-calculator at www.acfonline.org.au is easy to use and covers more emission areas in its eleven questions, though there are still some gaps. For example, there is no consideration of food miles or whether organic or non-organic food is being consumed.  However, the calculator is still a useful guide and does elaborate on each of its questions.

Having established your baseline data, it’s then a matter of considering each category and working out how to reduce expenditure on them. That is what we are doing, though we are aiming to reduce our emissions by as much as possible rather than 10 percent so we will have less to offset at the end of the year

Calculating our emissions

To get an idea of the task ahead in making our household carbon neutral, we first needed to measure our current emissions. Australians have the highest per capita emissions in the industrialised world, at 28.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide and rising. The average for industrialised countries is 12.8 t, with countries such as France (8.2 t), and the UK (10.8 t) being much lower.

These figures come from the Kyoto Protocol accounting mechanisms, which doesn’t include international flights or international shipping. So greenhouse emissions from taking overseas flights or buying imported products are additional to this national average.

However, per capita emissions are not the same as personal emissions. The former takes in all emissions – from business, industry, agriculture, transport, etc – generated in a country, and divides this number by the population size. Personal emissions on the other hand are those that you are directly responsible for; for example, from using electricity and from buying petrol, food, clothes and appliances. Then there's the question of whether personal emissions should also include those related to work. After all, work related emissions can be quite significant, particularly for people whose job involves travelling by plane.

After some discussion, we decided that including work-related emissions was just too hard and for the purposes of this exercise we will deal only with our personal emissions over which we have direct control. Bruce trawled the web and came up with several personal carbon calculators, mainly associated with carbon offset companies or charities. They provided some of the answers we needed but not all, because the calculators vary in what they take into account and in how they calculate the carbon dioxide emissions. Over the next few postings we'll be attempting to calculate our emissions from electricity use, car use, plane travel, food, household waste, and all the other bits and pieces that aren't covered by those categories.

November's plan

Things were a bit quiet blog-wise for the second half of October as I was in Sydney working on another project. I travelled up by train, came back by bus and used Sydney's comprehensive public transport  system - trains, buses and ferries - to travel the length and breadth of the city, thus minimising my transport greenhouse emissions compared to plane or car travel.

Having spent October thinking about how to become C neutral, we are going to focus on a different issue each month. For November, we've chosen carbon calculators. Many different calculators are available online and it will be interesting to see how comprehensive and how consistent they are. We also need to calculate our own emissions now, to see how effective we are at reducing them over the coming year. We plan to investigate global and national emissions, as well as personal ones.

In December, with Christmas nearly upon us, we thought it would be a good time to look at food, drink and presents, as the festive season is generally not planet friendly.