Riot for Austerity update

I haven't talked about my participation in the Riot For Austerity for a while, although I have been taking my meter readings on the first day of each month for the past year, tracking our use of water, electricity, natural gas, and fuel for the car, plus we weigh all of our garbage and total it up each month, so that we can get a feeling for whether we are reducing it or not over the course of the year.

For those of you not familiar with the challenge, the Riot was started by Peak Oil writer, Sharon Astyk and her friend Miranda, with the intent to reduce their family's resource use to 90% of that of the average American - deemed by Peak Oil expert George Monbiot as the amount that those in affluent countries would need to reduce their emissions to in order to avoid the worst effects of global warming.

For me, the challenge also has a social context, in that those of us in affluent western nations are using much, much more than our fair share of the earth's finite natural resources. I believe this inequity (and waste) is not only resulting in global warming, but is also responsible for some of the dysfunction we experience in our society these days: the obsession with buying Stuff instead of building Community is one aspect.

So, I participate not only in order to try and get my family's resource use as low as possible and play our part in hopefully reducing the effects of global warming, but also because it will save us money (thus allowing me to stay at home instead of going back to work), and - more importantly - to me it is the morally right thing to do. Just because I was blessed to be born in Australia doesn't give me the right to squander clean water or refined oil, and pollute our environment without care.

The Riot covers seven categories, although in 2008 I recorded results for only five of them: Petrol (gasoline), water, electricity, heating and cooking energy (natural gas) and garbage. This year I hope to record the final two categories as well : Consumer goods and food. (Click on the seven categories link to read more about how each of the categories are calculated).

Results for 2008

Gasoline/petrol: The average Australian car travels 14600km per year, using roughly 1665L of petrol per year. We started the year with two cars, so we set a goal of a total of 1128L for the year for the two cars combined. Our final result however - despite selling our second car in July - worked out at 2356L, or (taking into account 7 months use of the second car) only an 11% reduction on the average. Argh! Pretty woeful results, which I am really disappointed with. Still, a reduction of 11% is better than nothing, and I am now resolved to try and do even better this year.

Our biggest issue is the lack of accessible public transport where we live, plus my in-laws live a 35-minute drive away (and have no public transport at all), which accounts for over half our travel each year. This year I will begin keeping a log of each individual trip for a month or two, which might give me a better insight into where, when and how long each trip lasts? I'm fortunate that our car has one of those digital trip meters, which gives me a readout of the kilometres travelled, time taken and petrol used. If nothing else, having arecord of exactly how many litres of fuel are used (and therefore the cost) for each typical trip will make for interesting reading. I imagine that having a list on the fridge with something like "Trip to Bunnings = $4" might cut help persuade my other half to write a list before he goes!


Water: The average Australian household uses 625L/day. We set our goal as 120L/day, and although we managed to get it as low as 320L/day at one stage, our average for the year ended up at 412L/day - not helped by the very hot and very dry weather recently, requiring lots of water on the vegie garden. That works out at a 34% reduction on the average.

This past week we've purchased a new front-loading washing machine (due to arrive next week), since our 12-year-old, repaired-several-times top-loader was starting to play up. The new machine uses around 76L per wash, in comparison to the roughly 130L my old machine used, and it's also bigger so theoretically I also will be doing less washes per week. We've also replaced our old poor-quality bathroom tapware with new, 5-star water-efficiency rated (Australian-made!) tapware, which has a flow-rate half that of our old basin set (when it wasn't leaking). In addition, we've also installed a Every Drop Water Saver switch on our main bathroom shower. We've had one of these switches - which allows you to turn the water flow off while you soap up without losing your water pressure or temperature settings - on our ensuite shower for over a year now and it's fabulous. Now that my girls are getting older they are starting to prefer showers over baths; now they can spend as much time as they like soaping up and mucking about without wasting heaps of water.

So, between the washing machine, the tapware and the Water Saver on the shower, I am hoping to see some improvements in our water use this year! We are also saving for a second, small water tank, which we hope to install close to our laundry later this year. We have calculated we can probably fit a tall, skinny 1000 to 1500L tank in the back corner of our block if we remove a tree. Not much, but it all helps, and we just don't physically have the room for anything larger.


Electricity: The average Australian household uses 6900kWh per year of electricity (though this varies vastly from state to state), which works out at 18.9kWh per day. Our best result was 10.7kWh/day over one month, but overall we ended up using 12.6kWh/day, or 4601kWh. That's a 33% reduction on the average, but nowhere near what we were counting on. Our ducted air conditioner uses a lot of power so the recent hot weather has bumped up our average, despite limiting it's use to only a couple of hours a day on the real stinkers, but I suspect a goodly proportion of the rest of our use is my recalcitrant family who love nothing more than to turn on every light and appliance in the house at once! I seem to spend half my day walking around the house turning things off. Sigh.

An electrician friend of ours is on holidays at the moment (who works for mate's rates ;-), so yesterday we bought ceiling fans for our combined lounge and dining room and the study, the only three rooms left in the house with no fans. That should make a difference to our comfort levels anyway, although I tend to move to a room that has a fan rather than turn the air conditioner on at the moment, so they probably won't have a huge impact on our electricity use. We are also hoping to replace our desktop computer with a more energy-efficient laptop sometime over the next year or so, so perhaps that will also make a small difference (although I try to limit the time the PC is on during the day). I guess I am going to have to just stay ever-vigilant with keeping all unnecessary lights and appliances turned off when not in use!


Natural Gas: The average Australian uses 100MJ/day. Our best month was 28MJ/day, but our yearly average was 36.7MJ/day, or 63% less than the average. Ideally, I'd like to get this down even more by utilising my solar oven more often in this coming year. I have been a little wary of using it with the girls around this past year, as it does get very hot on the outside on a hot day and Miss Three definitely has enquiring little fingers, so I've worried about her hurting herself. It's also a little awkward to carry inside and out, so I am looking to find somewhere to store it permanently outside, perhaps one of those benches with a storage section under the seat (where I could also store the kids' gumboots away from spiders [eeek!] and the gardening gear I use every day)?


Garbage (landfill): The average Aussie living in NSW each sends a whopping 19.2kg of waste to landfill every week! Our final result was an average of just 2.0kg/week for our household or a 90% reduction on one average person. I'm pretty pleased with that obviously, although I still feel that there is room for improvement when I look at how many plastic wrappers we still throw away (from our dried beans for example) although I try to reuse them for something else at least once before disposal.

Recycling: The average Aussie recycles 3.1kg of waste per week. Our final result was 1.17kg/ week, or a 62% reduction on the average. Clearly, there's still some room for improvement there too. Again, I try to reuse anything that would normally go into the recycling bin (such as using toilet rolls for seedling pots), but I think I need to look at putting pressure on my local bulk food suppliers to provide the facility for "bring-your-own" containers, something that is available in the big cities, but not around here unfortunately.

So! Lots of work still to do unfortunately (no rest for the wicked and all that), but I'm going to be positive about it and view it as an opportunity to do better! At least if nothing else, I now know where we are doing well, and where we are falling down, and now I have a plan of attack to address those issues.