Hi everyone, this is my first post here. I’m Serena, by the way. I thought I’d make my entrance by telling you guys all about my personal carbon footprint.
There are definitely more things that I could be doing to reduce it, but I’m not the worst offender that I know, which is mildly comforting (though still guilt-inducing). For example, I am a bit of a foodie, and I love meat which I know is not only animal-unfriendly, but environmentally-unfriendly. However, I go to the fresh produce markets every week (usually twice) to make sure I’m purchasing local food that hasn’t had to travel halfway across the country to reach me. I always buy organic and free range meat, and have lately been trying to cut back my meat consumption. The effort is actually a good one to make, because not only are you supporting more environmentally friendly food, you’re also getting much better quality!
In terms of water use, my family is really big on reusing water – if I take a bath (which I love), I have to bucket the water out into the washing machine as wash water, and then use the rinse water in the machine as either wash water for the next load or use it to water the garden. We have mostly drought-related plants in our garden, which my father takes good care of, so our water use in the garden isn’t bad at all. We have timers on our shower walls to make sure we don’t spend too long in there, and have water saving toilets and shower nozzles.
We recycle all our paper, but don’t have a scrap paper box at home which would be an excellent idea since we use a lot of paper and often only print on one side (I know, we’re awful L). Another way we could save is to buy recycled paper – I only recently discovered we’ve been buying Reflex paper which is one of those evil environmentally-unfriendly paper brands. We also should be buying recycled toilet paper and kitchen paper. I’m a huge bottled water person – I love it, and I get dehydrated so easily so I always have at least one waterbottle on me. I usually reuse the same bottle for a number of weeks, but I’m a little scatterbrained and have a tendency to lose them a lot. This means that I probably buy a bottle of water once every three weeks, more often if I’m working and get thirsty. I should be being more careful about this because this is an area which is really hurting Australia at the moment – I think there was some gigantic number of littered plastic drink bottles collected on Clean Up Australia Day.
Like Tas, we also used to leave our computers switched on at the walls until about a year ago when we realised it ate electricity even without being on, and now my family is fanatical about leaving nothing on overnight, including computers, televisions, vcrs and dvd players, cd players and so on. We have ducted heating in my house, which would be a big thing to go without since my mother and I feel the cold dreadfully (we grew up in the tropics and Canberra was a real shock!!!) However, over the last few years, we have all been consciously trying to reduce our use of the heating, never letting it go higher than 20 degrees and only letting it on between certain hours of the day during the week and only in the afternoon/evening before bed on weekends. We do have a fireplace which we use A LOT in wintertime (there’s something so comforting about a roaring fire) but I’m not sure on the effects of burning a fire. I’m going to assume it’s also quite bad, so there is somewhere that I can definitely improve simply by adding an additional layer of clothing instead.
That’s all I got for now, more later. J
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