How green is my household?

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.

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.

Interesting gifts

Hi, Hilary here, with a run down on what we received and gave for Xmas this year. Bruce had asked for a new bike (ie new to him - his present one is at least 25 years old). I found one for a very reasonable price on allclassifieds, a Canberra-based site that is great for finding stuff that it's not practical to buy on eBay. Becky (my 16-year old daughter) very thoughtfully bought Bruce a pack of brightly coloured potato plates; we ate our Christmas dinner off them, and then saved on the washing up by putting them straight into the worm farm (thus giving the worms an Xmas treat).

Becky received lots of second-hand books and some recycled jeans (as well as some less environmentally friendly gifts, such as Swiss chocolates and enormous leather boots). However, the 'greenest' present was my gift from Bruce, which came in the form of piles of sand, clayey soil, bricks and bits of wood, beautifully gift wrapped in a huge blue tarpaulin.  Luckily I'd asked for all this stuff, so I was delighted.

Our biggest use of power is for cooking, and I've experimented over recent years with various options, including a hay box (not at all successful) and a solar cooker (great, but requires at least 5 hours of solid sunshine, and is only really useful in summer). So, inspired by the Earth Garden publication Back Yard Oven, I decided to try to build a cob oven. My parents gave me the latest edition of Build Your Own Earth Oven for my birthday back in May, but I had yet to get round to putting it into practice. Bruce's present to me was the 'ingredients' needed to get started with building the oven.

The book recommends starting with a couple of practice ovens, the first only big enough for a couple of muffins. It wasn't a success, but I learnt a lot and now feel ready to go on to oven number two. Here is an illustrated account of the building of the mini-oven (click on each image to see a larger photo):

The mound of sand (rather too high - it was meant to be 'hemispherical')

The sand covered with a layer of wet newspaper

The final product - I covered the newspaper with a thick layer of dough made from clay and sand, let that dry a bit (because I'd made it too wet), cut out a door (but made it much too small) and cleared out all the sand.

The oven alight, but smoking chokingly rather than burning merrily as it should. The problem was the door being too small, but as the mud and sand mixture had set like rock by the time I realised the error, I couldn't enlarge the door without breaking up the whole thing. I'll know better next time.

A cheery cherry harvest

Hi, Bruce here. We're trying a new approach to blogging, because maintaining a weekly schedule of ‘big’ issues was proving difficult. Instead, we’re just going to talk about the day-by day-things we do to reduce our impact on the planet. It’ll be a mix of big and little issues, all of which, we hope, will eventually help us to meet our goal of being carbon neutral ― or even carbon positive!

There are hundreds of ways to reduce your carbon footprint and one of the best is to grow your own fruit and veggies. Growing your own food – organically of course –reduces greenhouse emissions associated with commercial growing, packing and transporting of produce.

This week was cherry harvest time – the first picking of the year – and what a harvest it was! We have two 15-year-old cherry trees, pruned to keep them small enough to be netted – otherwise the crimson rosellas would have a feast and we wouldn’t!

Five weeks ago, one of my sons helped me net trees when the fruit were just little green blobs. Last weekend, and again today, we reaped the benefits of looking after the trees for all those years, and picked over 40 kg of large, red, ripe, delicious cherries.

So what does one do with a personal cherry mountain? Fortunately, three of our neighbours have wineries – we live in a rural area near Canberra – and I traded several kilos in exchange for bottles of wine. So, our wine cellar expanded greatly, and of course, the wine had very low wine miles!

Freezing and bottling accounted for several more kilos, and the rest will be given to friends or enjoyed at home.

So, why not plant a fruit tree, or better still, several trees in your backyard – we’ve had a great time with the cherries, and there are still the apples, peaches, nectarines, etc to come. Looks as if we’re going to have a very fruity summer.

Flights of fancy

Hi, Hilary here. Regular readers of this blog will have noticed how quiet it's been lately; that's because I've been in the UK for a month with my daughter visiting family, and Bruce has been flat out looking after the farm (and himself) in our absence. Of course, our flights generate many tonnes of greenhouse gases, and have to be offset somehow, but that’s a difficult topic that I’ll tackle in a future post. One thing I really noticed on this trip was food. Organic and fair-traded foods are much more widely available there, and people seem more concerned about where their food comes from. In one supermarket near my parents' home in northeast London, I could buy a packet of spinach from a named farmer in East Anglia (the nearest agricultural area), and there was an apologetic notice explaining that the broccoli was from the USA because the UK crop was under water. But perhaps things are changing in Australia too. Last Friday’s Bush Telegraph included a segment on a couple in Black Mountain who eat guinea pig as an alternative to chicken, and another about Age journalist Richard Cornish, who spent a month as a ‘locavore’ — eating only food produced within 160 km of his home. I was quite taken by the guinea pig idea, they breed rapidly, are easy to kill and skin, cook within minutes and apparently taste delicious. Sadly, my suggestion to Bruce that we turn part of the shed into a guinea pig farm was met with strong resistance. He kept guinea pigs as a child and is not prepared to eat them (I kept them too, but that wouldn’t stop me, I must be harder hearted than Bruce).

Positive thoughts

Hi, Bruce here, I thought I should put a more positive spin on our efforts after reading Hilary’s ‘Negative thoughts' post.

The thing I’m feeling positive about is our food. Most carbon calculators only address easily measured and monitored items such as petrol, electricity and gas usage. However, research by Professor Manfred Lenzen of Sydney University, shows that fossils fuels only account for 25 % of our per capita carbon emissions. What about the other 75%?

Professor Lenzen has developed a personal greenhouse gas calculator, from which he calculates that the production, packaging and transport of food causes 20% of our carbon emissions. He identified seven food and one drink category, and allocated a ‘greenhouse price’ per dollar spent to each of these. Beef products have the highest ‘price’ at 8.9 per $ spent, while fruit and vegetables have the lowest at 1.4.

To calculate your food ‘greenhouse’ budget, you need to know your annual expenditure on each of these categories. I did this for a month (March) and extrapolated to get an (approximate) annual figure. I then compared our results with Lenzen’s national averages for each category.

I was appalled to find that our food emissions were 5.2 tonnes — above the national average of 4.9 tonnes.  We don’t eat beef, we shop locally, rarely buy imported foods, grow a lot of veggies, buy mainly organic food and don’t over eat, all of which should have lowered our emissions, so how could we be higher than average?

I then remembered that Prof Lenzen’s work was based on 1994/95 prices, and I was using 2007 prices, thus inflating the results (his calculator is currently being updated). Since the CPI has increased by 36.5% since 1995, I adjusted our expenditure for each of the categories, and came up with a revised figure of 3.3 tonnes, well below the national average — what a relief, and something to feel really positive about!

But wait, there’s more. The organic food we buy doesn’t use high-energy inputs such as fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides, so will produce less emissions than non-organic food. This is not factored into the calculator. Also, our low food miles will reduce emissions relative to the national average, so I’m giving us a 10% reduction in emissions for both food miles and organic shopping, which brings our annual food-based emissions down to a mere 2.6 tonnes.

I’ll do another month’s recording and take an average, just to make sure we have got it right, but I’m pleased to report that Hilary cheered up enormously on hearing the results so far.

Food, glorious food!

Hi, Bruce and Hilary here for a change. Food has received a passing mention in previous posts, but we thought it was time to get serious about it, particularly as we’re both currently immersed in books about this topic — Hilary is grappling with Not on the label: What Really Goes into the Food on Your Plate and Bruce is wading through The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. Since we both read in bed, this has made for some interesting bedtime conversations as we swap details about the horrors of battery-reared chickens or the madness of flying a green bean from the UK to Kenya and back again (the beans apparently get hand-tied with a chive during their brief sojourn in the African continent).

In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, there’s a lot to think of with food, including how it’s produced, processed, packaged, transported, stored, shopped for, cooked and disposed of! We thought we’d start at the beginning, with food production. Where possible, we buy organic produce, which is much more planet-friendly because it’s grown without artificial chemicals. This is nicely explained in the article Eating fossil fuels, which calculates that about 1500 litres of oil are needed each year to feed a single American, about a third of which is used to produce inorganic fertilisers.

When there’s a choice between buying local produce that’s not organic and imported produce that is organic, we’re going for the local produce. Our thinking is that the advantages of the organic production are probably wiped out by the food miles if the food is imported. Buying at the farmers’ market we can often get the best of both worlds, with lots of locally produced organic food on offer. There’s an added benefit from the food being sold directly from the farmer to us in an unheated shed, which is that it doesn’t carry those additional greenhouse gas emissions associated with the heating, cooling and lighting of a supermarket. And of course, there is the unquantifiable benefit that comes from being served by a nice friendly person, who is delighted to be selling their produce directly to the customer.

Solar cooking and more

Hi Hilary here, with some food issues. To start with something positive, I'm proud to say that today I prepared roast lamb in the solar cooker that I finished building last weekend (using instructions from the web). I cooked the lamb for about 4.5 hours, moving the cooker slightly every hour or so to make sure that it was in full sun. Here are some photos of the the cooker in front of the house (with the solar hot water system also in view), and a close up of the lamb in the cooker:

Click on images to enlarge

Yesterday I steamed corn on the cob in the cooker, which was quite successful, but then tried to bake potatoes and made the mistake of leaving the cooker unattended for 5 minutes with the glass lid off, so those immediately disappeared into the dog.

I'm very pleased that using the cooker will reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, because I had a frustrating time in the supermarket last week trying to buy 'greenhouse friendly' food. We usually have the luxury of buying most of our food from a local farmers' market, which is great because it means we can get organic food, produced (relatively) locally, that tastes better and is cheaper than what we can get in the supermarket. However, the market was shut for 3 weeks over the holiday period, and the garden isn't producing enough to sustain us, so we were reduced to supermarket shopping.

First there's the issue of organic versus local. Do I buy the organic pasta from Italy, or the standard one from Australia? Which is more environmentally friendly, given the huge amount of fossil fuels used to produce the chemicals needed for conventional farming? Is it sustainable to grow wheat in Australia? Should I just give up and eat potatoes instead?

At least the pasta was clearly labelled with its country of origin, which is more than could be said for most of the processed products I looked at, like crushed tomatoes, breakfast cereal and olive oil. I don't have great eyesight, and really struggled to find the country of origin on most products. In some cases, they were helpfully labelled 'Australian made and owned', but does that mean the produce comes from Australia - probably not.  If we want people to buy locally, then we surely need to make it easier for them to do so.

Okay, rant over and off to bed.

Reducing our food miles

We're lucky that Canberra hosts a fantastic farmers' market every Saturday morning, allowing us to buy lots of local produce and thus reduce our food miles. We now do our major shopping there almost every week, buying veggies, fruit, meat, fish, bread, and even chickens for our permaculture garden. Much of the stuff on offer is organic, and it's all very reasonably priced. Previously we spent a lot of money buying organic produce from various shops, but using the markets is a lot cheaper and has the advantage of being a social event - we always find there are people there that we know and can sit and have a coffee with.
Unfortunately this week I then undid all the benefit of reduced food miles by following the markets with a trip to a book shop, where I bought about six new books with a combined weight of several kilos. We've been trying to buy mainly recycled books (helped by the fact that Bruce works as a volunteer, sorting second-hand books for a charity whose main fundraiser is a biannual bookfair), but I called in to a bookshop and was tempted by the range of gardening books and crime novels.

Wine and chocolates

Last week I looked after the neighbours’ dogs, cat and chooks. They generously rewarded me today with 6 bottles of vino from their vineyard ― we live in a rural area about 30 mins drive from Canberra’s CBD ― and a box of Swiss chocolates.

The wine fitted in nicely with our new food buying strategy, ie buy local, regional or nationally produced products in that order of availability, to reduce food miles ― the distance food travels from producer to plate ― in order to reduce greenhouse emissions associated with transport. We had already decided to buy our bottled wine from the three wineries along our road, rather than buying wine that had travelled thousands of km from around Australia or overseas.

We will continue to buy Banrock cask wine (South Australian) for the evening glass with dinner, as Banrock donates a percentage of sales to conserve natural habitat in Australia and overseas. They are currently supporting a bilby conservation program along the Murray River.

However, the chocolates were imported from Switzerland (big food miles!). We are forcing ourselves to enjoy them, though should we ever need to buy chocs for gifts, we will choose an Australian brand instead.