I joined the Riot for Austerity mailing list sometime this past summer. I posted my baseline and then proceeded to figure out where I should begin.
Thinking that the goals were impossible to reach, I decided to try anyway and I am glad I did because my progress in three areas are fantastic! They are: electricity, transportation and garbage output.
Electricity: We switched to using wind powered energy in August. Although there are highs and lows in how much electricity we use, we average about 300 kwh per month. Because we use wind energy, we get a “payback”, so we use 75 kwh per month which is below the riot’s goal. I would still like to reduce our usage, because I think for two people who are barely home, 10 kwh per day is a bit high. I suspect most of the wattage comes from our two luxury items: our desktop computers. I would like to eventually move to a laptop, but since our desktops work well I’ve been delaying the purchase. Using a laptop will also allow us to live in a small space because we have these two giant machines taking up so much room. Another watt sucker is probably our fridge. Since we rent, and have always been renters to date none of our landlords have had incentives to get energy efficient refrigerators. I’ve been playing around with the idea of turning off the power on one day per week when it gets really cold.
Transportation: Since we are car free, we rely on public transit to get to work. We use our legs or bicycles to get around else where (such as to get food, or meet friends). My usage is 40.32 gallons per year. My husband’s is even lower at 21.75 gallons per year. My commute is longer than his. Besides getting to work, we almost never use public transit. Riot’s goal is 50 gallons per year. Yesterday I finally figured out what 1 barrel of oil was. Its 158 (and a bit extra) litres. I am happy with our transportation usage and don’t have any plans on changing anything.
Garbage: I cheated a little bit here and used our more current garbage (past month) output rather than our average in order to figure out where I stand with the riot’s goals. Its now about 1lb per week which is less than the riot’s goal of 3.15 lbs per week. This drop has mainly come about after we began composting. We also have completely eliminated processed and packaged food so everything we eat is cooked from scratch. This has been especially nice because it means I can warm up in the kitchen since I am freezing my buns. I eventually want to produce zero waste so we’re working on that.
I am currently working on reducing how much water we use (by reusing bath water for flushing the toilet). Our gas bill is still around $40/month because we use it to heat water (for hot showers and washing dishes). We do our laundry with cold water and use a line dryer to dry our clothes. So there isn’t any more reduction to be had on the gas front (hee!). As for how much consumer goods we spent money on this year, I haven’t got the numbers. I stopped tracking our money when I got severely stressed at school for several months. Most of the electronic goods (crockpot, lamp) were purchased used. The soy milk maker, sheep skin slippers, and a few other items were not. Next year I plan on doing a lot of tracking. I plan on tracking income and expenses, food usage (such as pounds of flour) and cost, and any other metrics I can think of.
