ALS Cutting Your Carbons Challenge: Week 1, Food & Debt

The Cutting Your Carbons Challenge has started today at Aussies Living Simply, beginning with the Debt Challenge and the Food Challenge.

In short, the aim of the debt challenge is to increase your debt repayment by 10% this month. It might seem odd that debt is included in a greenhouse gas emmissions challenge, but as Rhonda explains, in order to increase your debt repayments by 10% you have to stop spending as much money! By not spending as much money, you aren't buying as much stuff; but not buying as much stuff, you are saving resources, their embodied energy and the GHG required to produce and transport them, and the waste that they will ultimately produce! Simple really. Plus you get out of debt faster (obviously!), meaning that if you persist with the techniques you implemented this week, it will be much sooner than you anticipated when you can cut back on working hours to spend more time with your family, invest in sustainable technology (e.g. solar hot water), or buy organic groceries for example.

Our monthly home loan repayments are in the vicinity of $1400, therefore I need to come up with an extra $140 this month, which seems do-able, although I am yet to study our budget in detail to work out where it is going to come from, LOL. I might have to get busy selling things on eBay again :-) This week was also supposed to be "delivery of the rainwater tank" week, but once again, that has been put off until around July 4 by the manufacturer (*sigh* It's only been almost six months now), so that will free up a little bit of extra money.

Similarly, the aim of the Food Challenge is to cut your spending on groceries and food by 10% this week. Food production is a huge source of greenhouse gases (accounting for around 7.7 tonnes of CO2 per year for the average household), both in the production of the actual food, the packaging of it and in the transport of these items, so a 10% reduction in spending represents a significant savings in GHG emissions (around 15kg of CO2 for the week I calculated, or to use the black balloon imagery, 300 black balloons full of CO2). A year ago I would have found this challenge a cinch - stop eating takeaway for the week, don't buy junk food or biscuits etc, and go without as many (or all) meat meals for the week. Easy! But now, I'm finding that I've spent some time looking at our grocery list for this week and I really don't know where we can cut back? I already cook mainly vegetarian meals, I don't buy many processed food items, cook many things from scratch and try to buy in bulk where I can. So I've decided to look at it from the point of view of the resources required to manufacture and transport the food by:
* reducing the volume of packaging I buy (especially plastic),
* buying fewer preserved products (tinned and frozen food), and
* reducing the amount of imported items I buy (i.e. increasing the volume of local products). I've already been shopping today but that was unavoidable, so I am going to do this challenge from tomorrow to next Sunday, using today's shop as my baseline for calculating my 10% reduction.