It's a little crazy to think that a quarter of a year has gone by since I started the Riot for Austerity 90% Emissions Reduction Challenge! Here's where I stand after three months:
GASOLINE
On a daily basis, we are still use 90% less (or perhaps even less) than the average American uses. I haven't actually been keeping track since my primary form of transportation is the bus or the metro, and I don't even use them everyday. I am going to go on a number of trips in the last few months of this year, however, so this is one area where my "progress" is about to do a 180.
Three-month status: On a daily basis, we use 90% less than the average American uses.
ELECTRICITY
I said in my baseline post that we are allowed 90 kwH per month. I only get an electric bill once every two months, so the last bill I got was two months ago, and I was holding steady at my baseline figure of 125 kwH per month. However, since then, I have reread the rules of this challenge and noted that hydro-powered electricity users are allowed four times the standard allotment. Wikipedia (a site that would never lie, right?) says that 97% of the energy Hydro-Québec produces is, well, hydroelectric. So if 97% of my 90 kwH gets to be tripled, my goal is actually 265 kwH per month, which I am way under. I have made some electricity-saving changes around the apartment, so I am anxious to see my next electricity bill. I would still really like to hit 90 kwH per month.
Three-month status: Still waiting for the bill! The last time I got the bill, we used 95% (with hydro bonus applied) less than the average American uses.
HEATING AND COOKING ENERGY
When I did the baseline calculations, I decided that we should only be allowed 10% of the 90% allotment in this category because we only get billed for our cooking energy. I think I was being hard on myself, but I also don't have any more specific numbers about how much of this should go for cooking and how much for heating. Because we can't control our heat, I'm going to just throw up my hands and say we can have the entire 23.5 cubic meters per month. But I'm also not really going to count this category since it is compromised. I'm going to go for steady progress rather than a number goal. This is a hard one for us since we do a lot of cooking from scratch. Beer brewing also takes up gigantic amounts of energy in this category.
Three-month status: For cooking alone, we use 93% less than the average American uses.
GARBAGE
Our scale has been getting finicky lately, and it doesn't like heavy things, so I haven't been able to weigh our garbage or recycling. I have been reusing plastic bags more diligently and thinking hard about each container I recycle, trying to reuse it. I can't do much about the paper. I started a worm composting bin, but I still end up throwing out way more organic matter than I would like. When I have large amounts of it (after preserving foods or brewing beer) I take it to a friend's house where there is a proper compose pile.
Three-month status: Not sure. Still too much waste. :(
CONSUMER GOODS
This one is harder than I thought it would be, especially because textbooks are expensive! Here's how we did, with deductions in place:
June: $98 (88% less than average)
July: $277 (67% less than average)
August: $207 (75% less than average)
Three-month status: We spent 77% less than the average American.
FOOD
This is a hard category too. We buy a lot of stuff in the third (non-local, non-bulk) category. And we cook from scratch for most of our meals, so it's not as though we're buying lots of processed, pre-packaged food. We just seem to buy a lot of ingredients that we can't get (or haven't figured out how yet) locally or in bulk. Our CSA has certainly helped us improve in the local category. I've also started buying more dry stuff in bulk. This past week we hardly bought anything in category three, so maybe we are doing better.
Three-month status: This is only a guess. 55% local, 15% bulk, 30% everything else.
Showing posts with label emissions reduction challenge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label emissions reduction challenge. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Friday, August 03, 2007
Sweat till you bleed
I knew that if I just waited long enough, Canada would deliver. And deliver it has! It's finally hot! Last night the weather didn't cool off as much as it usually does, so we are facing a hot day in our non-airconditioned apartment. It's certainly not nearly as bad as in our non-airconditioned house back in KC where we faced a kind of oppressive heat I hesitate to wish upon even my worst enemies.
Luckily for me, and now for you, I have some tricks up my sleeve for finding comfort in an overly warm apartment. I wrote an article about it over at the green site a while back. Give it a read and try out the techniques if you too are feeling the heat at home. Remember that it takes time for your body to adjust to the heat, especially if you work in a cold building all day. So be patient. You may want to eat ice cream or drink cold beer while your body adjusts!
Luckily for me, and now for you, I have some tricks up my sleeve for finding comfort in an overly warm apartment. I wrote an article about it over at the green site a while back. Give it a read and try out the techniques if you too are feeling the heat at home. Remember that it takes time for your body to adjust to the heat, especially if you work in a cold building all day. So be patient. You may want to eat ice cream or drink cold beer while your body adjusts!
Monday, July 02, 2007
Edward Abbey rules
I read this quote on the 90% Emissions Reduction email list.
From a speech that Edward Abbey gave in Colorado, which was published in High Country News in the 1970s or early 1980s under the title "Joy, Shipmates, Joy."
"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards."
From a speech that Edward Abbey gave in Colorado, which was published in High Country News in the 1970s or early 1980s under the title "Joy, Shipmates, Joy."
yumyum
Right now I am eating homemade yogurt made from local, organic milk topped with strawberry-rhubarb sauce made from local strawberries and rhubarb. This is the first time I've ever had rhubarb that I can remember and definitely the first time I've ever cooked with it. The sauce turned out sweeter than expected, and the yogurt turned out more sour than expected, so the mix is delicious. I hope you are enjoying fresh local produce wherever you are!
Saturday, June 09, 2007
Baseline
Over the past week, I've tried to come up with a baseline for the 90% challenge that I've decided to take on. (Matt is sort of taking it on.) Because we are not in control of and cannot track progress in some of the categories, we are not going to be able to do the whole challenge, but I still think it will be fun to see how low we can go in the other categories. Here is where we stand now.
GASOLINE
We are allowed 50 gallons each per year or .137 gallons each per day. According to the challenge rules, public transportation can be calculated at 100 miles per gallon. That means we are allowed to go 5000 miles per year or 13.7 miles each day on public transportation. We don't have a car anymore, so this is almost the only kind of transportation we use. I have seen a few sites that say that air travel is roughly around the same mpg per person. I know that I am going to be going to KC by air this winter, which is approximately 2400 miles round trip. If I don't want to bust my 90% allotment, I'll only get about 7 miles each day on public transportation. (Of course, that doesn't count all the gas I'll eat up once I get to KC, which has no public transportation to speak of! And it's 33 miles just from the airport to my mom's house!) I think this is entirely doable since I don't really go that many places, and I don't take public transportation every day. It's 5 miles round trip to Mary's house and 3.5 miles round trip to Twist Image. Anyway, enough rambling about gasoline.
Baseline: On a daily basis, we already use 90% less than the average American uses.
ELECTRICITY
We are allowed 90 kwH per month. According to our latest electric bill, we used 125 kwH last month. One caveat: the laundry machines are communal for the building, so I can't track that energy usage.
Baseline: We currently use 86% less than the average American uses. Woop!
HEATING AND COOKING ENERGY
We are allowed 100 therms or 283 cubic meters per year or 23.5 cubic meters per month. This one is tricky because we don't pay for (and are not in control of) the natural gas that is used for heating the apartment or for heating the water. We only pay for cooking fuel. I only found a couple sites that broke down natural gas usage by category, and they were not really in agreement. So I'm going with 10%. That means we are allowed 2 cubic meters each month for cooking. The latest natural gas bill I could find was from January, and we had used 14 cubic meters of natural gas. I'm not sure if this is something we'll be able to adjust that much. Also, if 2 cubic meters sounds way off to anyone, please let me know!
Baseline: We use roughly 30% less than the average American uses.
GARBAGE
We are allowed 6.3 pounds of garbage and .9 pounds of recycling each week. In the past four days, we've accumulated 5 pounds of garbage and 3.25 pounds of recycling. At that rate, we'd have 8.75 pounds of garbage and 5.7 pounds of recycling, or 14.45 pounds total. I know that a great deal of our garbage is cat litter/poop and vegetable scraps that could be composted. Because we live in an apartment, there is nothing we can do about the cat waste. The vegetable scraps are a different matter. Our friend MA has a compost pile. There are various places in town that accept scraps for community composting programs. We could try a worm bin. I am confident that we can and will improve a great deal in this category. We should also try to buy in bulk more and remember our cloth shopping bags to cut down on the amount of packaging we trash/recycle. One bit of progress already: today we brewed beer. We would have to throw away 4.5 pounds of spent grains and hops, but instead, I saved them and will get them to a compost pile soon!
Baseline: We throw out/recycle 53% less stuff than the average American.
WATER
We are allowed 20 gallons each day. Unfortunately, we can't track this since we are not billed for our water usage. I have a feeling that we are most certainly not down to 10% of the average, but I don't think we use as much as most people either. We certainly don't shower as much as normal people! :) Brewing beer uses a whole lot of water. We probably used at least 20 gallons just to make a 5 gallon batch of beer. I know that at least 5 of those gallons were unnecessary. (Yes, you know what I'm talking about, Matthew!) I'm sure that as we get more brewing experience, we will streamline our process in terms of time, energy and resources used.
CONSUMER GOODS
We are allowed $1000 per year or $83 per month. We don't spend a whole lot of money on things other than edibles for us and the cats, so I figured we were doing pretty well on this one. Then I added up how much money we spent on consumer goods this past month, and it was pretty eye opening. This last month, we spent approximately $450 dollars on clothes, a brew pot, curtains, a diva cup (which is totally awesome!), and a book by Karl Marx. At least half of that was on the clothes, and Matt and I are definitely not the most fashionable people you'll ever meet! I got a "job" and needed some new duds for that, and Matt caught the shopping bug. The last time we bought clothes before that... I honestly can't remember. However, for the sake of being fair, I'm going to count all of the money we spent for our baseline. After all, we have spent a lot on consumer goods in the past year, since we moved to a new city and had to buy a lot of furniture, etc. And it didn't all come from Craigslist.
Baseline: We currently spend 46% less than the average American on consumer goods.
FOOD
This is a tricky category. We are supposed to aim for 70% of our food being local and organic, 25% being dry bulk items, and 5% being the rest. This is very hard to approximate. What do you do about bread that is baked locally (or even in our own home!) but made with olive oil from Italy? What about the beer we brew? It uses lots of water and natural gas to make, but in turn, we re-use the same bottles and don't have to transport it anywhere (or package or advertise). In light of these concerns, I've decided to revamp this category a bit. We are now going to aim for 70% of food being local -- organic or not. I believe that while organice, sustainable growing practices are extremely important, eating locally and in season is even more important. This 70% will include anything we make at home (bread, beer, yogurt, etc) even if a few of the ingredients are not local. The other two food categories are basically the same.
Baseline According to last week's grocery list, our groceries were roughly 45% local, 10% dry bulk, and 45% everything else.
GASOLINE
We are allowed 50 gallons each per year or .137 gallons each per day. According to the challenge rules, public transportation can be calculated at 100 miles per gallon. That means we are allowed to go 5000 miles per year or 13.7 miles each day on public transportation. We don't have a car anymore, so this is almost the only kind of transportation we use. I have seen a few sites that say that air travel is roughly around the same mpg per person. I know that I am going to be going to KC by air this winter, which is approximately 2400 miles round trip. If I don't want to bust my 90% allotment, I'll only get about 7 miles each day on public transportation. (Of course, that doesn't count all the gas I'll eat up once I get to KC, which has no public transportation to speak of! And it's 33 miles just from the airport to my mom's house!) I think this is entirely doable since I don't really go that many places, and I don't take public transportation every day. It's 5 miles round trip to Mary's house and 3.5 miles round trip to Twist Image. Anyway, enough rambling about gasoline.
Baseline: On a daily basis, we already use 90% less than the average American uses.
ELECTRICITY
We are allowed 90 kwH per month. According to our latest electric bill, we used 125 kwH last month. One caveat: the laundry machines are communal for the building, so I can't track that energy usage.
Baseline: We currently use 86% less than the average American uses. Woop!
HEATING AND COOKING ENERGY
We are allowed 100 therms or 283 cubic meters per year or 23.5 cubic meters per month. This one is tricky because we don't pay for (and are not in control of) the natural gas that is used for heating the apartment or for heating the water. We only pay for cooking fuel. I only found a couple sites that broke down natural gas usage by category, and they were not really in agreement. So I'm going with 10%. That means we are allowed 2 cubic meters each month for cooking. The latest natural gas bill I could find was from January, and we had used 14 cubic meters of natural gas. I'm not sure if this is something we'll be able to adjust that much. Also, if 2 cubic meters sounds way off to anyone, please let me know!
Baseline: We use roughly 30% less than the average American uses.
GARBAGE
We are allowed 6.3 pounds of garbage and .9 pounds of recycling each week. In the past four days, we've accumulated 5 pounds of garbage and 3.25 pounds of recycling. At that rate, we'd have 8.75 pounds of garbage and 5.7 pounds of recycling, or 14.45 pounds total. I know that a great deal of our garbage is cat litter/poop and vegetable scraps that could be composted. Because we live in an apartment, there is nothing we can do about the cat waste. The vegetable scraps are a different matter. Our friend MA has a compost pile. There are various places in town that accept scraps for community composting programs. We could try a worm bin. I am confident that we can and will improve a great deal in this category. We should also try to buy in bulk more and remember our cloth shopping bags to cut down on the amount of packaging we trash/recycle. One bit of progress already: today we brewed beer. We would have to throw away 4.5 pounds of spent grains and hops, but instead, I saved them and will get them to a compost pile soon!
Baseline: We throw out/recycle 53% less stuff than the average American.
WATER
We are allowed 20 gallons each day. Unfortunately, we can't track this since we are not billed for our water usage. I have a feeling that we are most certainly not down to 10% of the average, but I don't think we use as much as most people either. We certainly don't shower as much as normal people! :) Brewing beer uses a whole lot of water. We probably used at least 20 gallons just to make a 5 gallon batch of beer. I know that at least 5 of those gallons were unnecessary. (Yes, you know what I'm talking about, Matthew!) I'm sure that as we get more brewing experience, we will streamline our process in terms of time, energy and resources used.
CONSUMER GOODS
We are allowed $1000 per year or $83 per month. We don't spend a whole lot of money on things other than edibles for us and the cats, so I figured we were doing pretty well on this one. Then I added up how much money we spent on consumer goods this past month, and it was pretty eye opening. This last month, we spent approximately $450 dollars on clothes, a brew pot, curtains, a diva cup (which is totally awesome!), and a book by Karl Marx. At least half of that was on the clothes, and Matt and I are definitely not the most fashionable people you'll ever meet! I got a "job" and needed some new duds for that, and Matt caught the shopping bug. The last time we bought clothes before that... I honestly can't remember. However, for the sake of being fair, I'm going to count all of the money we spent for our baseline. After all, we have spent a lot on consumer goods in the past year, since we moved to a new city and had to buy a lot of furniture, etc. And it didn't all come from Craigslist.
Baseline: We currently spend 46% less than the average American on consumer goods.
FOOD
This is a tricky category. We are supposed to aim for 70% of our food being local and organic, 25% being dry bulk items, and 5% being the rest. This is very hard to approximate. What do you do about bread that is baked locally (or even in our own home!) but made with olive oil from Italy? What about the beer we brew? It uses lots of water and natural gas to make, but in turn, we re-use the same bottles and don't have to transport it anywhere (or package or advertise). In light of these concerns, I've decided to revamp this category a bit. We are now going to aim for 70% of food being local -- organic or not. I believe that while organice, sustainable growing practices are extremely important, eating locally and in season is even more important. This 70% will include anything we make at home (bread, beer, yogurt, etc) even if a few of the ingredients are not local. The other two food categories are basically the same.
Baseline According to last week's grocery list, our groceries were roughly 45% local, 10% dry bulk, and 45% everything else.
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Man up, you pansy!
I just found this challenge to reduce your personal carbon emissions to 90% of the national average. This sounds like an awesome challenge, both in terms of difficulty and being a fantastic thing to do. Just reading about it gets my tree-hugging self all excited. I'm going to have to talk to Matt about it and also do some calculations to find out the Canadian national averages for the carbon emissions categories included, but as of this very moment, consider me a contender! Will you join me? It's exciting! It's daunting! I urge you to at least give it a good read and think about what small (or big) changes you can make to the way your lifestyle effects the world at large.
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