The Year In Review Part 2

Part one of my year in review is here. This second part has been harder to quantify than the electricity, water and gas I talked about in my last post as I have no hard figures to compare, which is actually a bit frustrating, but there have certainly been some pretty significant changes made over the past year.

Waste:
I wish that there were any easy way to compare "before" and "after", but I never had much of a feel for how much waste went into the bins each week prior to our shift in philosophy. I don't do much of the bin emptying (that's mainly DH's job) so I'm not really sure if the wheelie bin was full each week or not, or how full anyway. I suspect it was pretty chockers! As was the recycling bin, which goes out fortnightly. The recycling has been reduced pretty significantly as I no longer buy near as many tinned foods as I once did, nor do I buy the individual yoghurt pots for the kids, as I make my own yoghurt. Paper and cardboard gets shredded and goes into the compost mostly too. As for the regular waste that goes to landfill, I *think* I have reduced it by about a third? Hard to judge, but I only use cling wrap rarely now, I don't have the fruit and veg plastic bags anymore, I don't buy pre-packaged foods and I've tried to reduce the amount of non-recyclable packaging I do buy.

Most of our waste is coming from our kitchen in the form of food packaging, so plans for this coming year include reducing the amount of packaged food we buy even further (see below in under "food"). I'm also going to make it my business to check out how full the wheelie bin is each week, LOL, so I can get a better idea of how we are travelling in that area :-)

Food:
Again, it's hard to quantify, but BIG changes have been made in the kitchen. The most significant have been 1) our reduction in meat - we've gone from meat in our dinners 6 times a week to now only once a week or less (plus we rarely eat red meat); 2) buying mostly organic foods where we can and 3) cooking from scratch the majority of the time. I've also been working consistently on reducing the distance that our food has travelled to reach our plate, and I think I've had a big impact in that area: more than 70% of our grocery shopping items now are made in Australia. The percentage of our food that is now fresh (as opposed to preserved e.g. canned or frozen), has also increased enormously, while the proportion of our food that is processed (pre-made, pre-packaged e.g. stir-fry sauces and muesli bars) has decreased drastically. So, by default, has our intake of artificial additives :-)

Areas I'd like to continue working on this coming year are:
- growing even more of our own organic fruit and veg,
- decreasing our % of imported food even further,
- making our own pasta, and
- baking, baking and baking! Time has been an issue but I want to get to the point where I am making all of our own baked products, especially bread/ bread rolls/ pita bread/ tortillas as well as the sweet stuff.

Transport:
Having a pretty shoddy public transport system in the suburb where we live - and not living within walking distance of any shops - I have to say that I'm not sure if we've made much of an impact on reducing our use of the cars, sadly. We offset the emissions of both cars via Greenfleet, but of course we still try to cut down the total number of kilometres we do. I walk to school to pick up DD#1 when the weather permits and combine trips so that we aren't doing multiple runs to the local shops for several things over the course of a week (especially on the weekend), which has saved some of our travel, and I also try to source things from our local shopping centre by substituting if necessary.

So that I can get some "hard" figures on this, I'm going to start recording our weekly kilometres travelled each Monday, in a similar way to the way I've been recording our other meters. I've done this on the odd occasion over the past year, but never consistently, so it will be interesting to see if we can improve any over the next 12 months! The biggest change by far will be if we actually manage to get rid of the second car... I'd like to, but the logistics of getting DH to and from work each day (and the fact that he uses it frequently for work related jobs) is contributing to it being a decision we keep putting off. He keeps mentioning getting a bike, but to be perfectly honest it makes my skin crawl when I think of him riding in the insane peak hour traffic... Even imagining him on a motorbike would send me grey pretty rapidly, LOL. Which leaves us with the bodgy bus service... Hmmm.

Consumerist tendencies:
Wow, what a world of change in this department, LOL! I mentioned in a post some time ago that I used to find decluttering liberating, but now I find it depressing because I am ashamed of the stuff I've bought into my home over the years, the majority of which I thought were "bargains" at the time. I find it hard to clear out the drawers and cupboards any further now for that reason; every item that goes into the give-away bag represents money that could have been paid off our mortgage or gone into the kids' school fees. I know that stuff is better off with someone who can get some good use out of it, so I am hoping I will get over this feeling pretty soon and just get on with it, LOL.

I can also hardly bare to watch the commercial TV channels any more, not just because of the complete rubbish they show, but because the commercials makes me nauseous! I used to be able to mentally switch off when they were on, but now I feel sad for the thousands of people that are seeing these ads and buying these items (I actually wrote "goods" first but there's nothing "good" about them), with money they don't have because they maxed out their mortgage buying a bigger house to store it all in. *Sigh*

Anyway, needless to say that SEWING is #1 on my list of skills to learn this coming year! If for no other reason than mending broken zips and frayed hems will save a lot of time and effort in the clothing stores :-)

So that's pretty much it in a nutshell - done good, but room for improvement :-) I'm feeling quite optimistic about this coming year!