Personal habits

Okay, like you, here's the personal first. Sorry its not in dot points but it's not really my style and I tend to make really crap notes when I condense information so sorry about the wordiness. By the way NUS guys, we decided to jsut send our own indivual stuff at the moment because we tried to get organised for last week and it just didn't work. So here's my two cents. I'll be posting more up soon.

To reduce my personal carbon footprint, there are a number of steps that I can take. In the first place, I use public transport almost everywhere (because I am too lazy to get my licence), I recycle all my paper and send and read a lot of files electronically and put all my food scraps in the compost, I also use buckets to catch the water when I wash dishes or when I shower (here in Australia we have a pretty awful drought so people tend to be pretty aware of water usage, and besides, my mum is a total greenie), so there aren’t a lot of things for me to change in regards to my waste (although I could actually take shorter showers).

On the other hand there is a LOT that I can change in regards to my food and electricity consumption. 90% of our lights at home are energy efficient but I wasn’t aware until last week that laptops and mobile phone chargers consume electricity if they are plugged into the power socket, even if no electronics are hooked up to the charger. I now make a conscious effort to switch off power points when they are not in use, especially if there is a charger plugged in. I am constantly switching off lights and try to use heating as little as possible, although in winter it does get terribly cold here and so I use a column heater in my room and always wear a jumper and socks.

Another problem is my eating habits. My brother in on a high protein diet, and so in my household there tends to be a lot of red meat at dinner and definitely some sort of meat. That creates a huge carbon footprint as you all know and so I’ve decided to cut back on red meat (although I do love lamb, which is like Australia’s national food) along with my sister who is on a low fat diet, and doesn’t like eating red meat much anyway (I’m the only one of my siblings who is NOT on a diet). This is another problem, in order to reduce one’s carbon footprint it is necessary to change many parts of one’s lifestyle and I think making people change their habits is really hard.

Local produce is not hard to find, as long it is fruit and vegetables, but it is difficult to know where meat comes from, one of the biggest problems is that there aren’t really labelling systems to show where things come from within Australia, even if they are from within the country, and it is almost impossible with any sort of processed or packaged food. I think just cutting down on packaged food would be good.

I think the biggest problem is that habits become ingrained and they are hard to change, people don't want to restructure their homes, eating habits and lifestyles for no reason and I think that that's why we have to make sure that people know the good that their actions can do. So yeah, I'll be following this idea up later but its more than 11.30 and so I'll post my ideas up later when I'm more awake.