One Size Fits All

Here are my June 2008 Riot 4 Austerity numbers. These entries are taking longer and longer to write. I think if  and when I do wind up using 1% of U.S. average of all the riot areas, I’ll spend most of my time writing about how I’m using so little energy thus using very little energy. A little recursion if you will.

Gasoline: In June I drove alot. I also rode my bike and I took the bus/subway. But I probably drove more this month than I have driven in my entire life. So that’s alot of driving. Most of my driving experience to date has been to move from one place to another.

I drove to my class, but the gasoline usage isn’t very much because I tried to get the hybrid as often as possible. For example I rented the car for one entire day last week. The pain from my shingles was awful and I had to do a few things, but didn’t feel like getting on a bus that shakes and vibrates and aggravates the pain, so I reserved the car all day and even though I drove 64 miles (including a trip to Greens Grow farm), the fuel indicator didn’t budge from being full.

Total distance driven in June 2008 is 1360.8 miles. When I reserve a car from zipcar their computer calculates exactly how many miles are driven after I return the car. I get a certain number of miles for free with every reservation per day which is included in the base rate, and then every mile above that has another rate. Phillycarshare is almost always booked at the locations I want and for the time I want so I rely on zipcar when Phillycarshare isn’t available (their cars are cheaper). I drove a car called Toyota Matrix to the funeral and the round trip distance was 909 miles. Gas is included with both car sharing services but when driving to the funeral I filled up 35 gallons worth of gasoline. Toyota’s website says the Prius gets 45 mpg which is the number I’m going to use to make the math simple. So this adds another 10 gallons to the total usage. So I used about 3 gallons of gas more than the average U.S. consumer. But if you look at the number from a household standpoint, that is about 22.5 gallons because my husband did come with me on our 909 mile trip. Still…I really f*cking hate driving after this month. I’d like to say that I never intend to drive ever again. But you know the saying, "never say never…"

Electricity: We used 368 kwh of wind powered electricity. And this is apparently 10% of the national average according to the riot calculator. I had the AC on for alot of the month because I thought my shingles were heat boils for awhile. And life was hard so we just enjoyed some luxury. I finally bought my first ever laptop. So hopefully the usage will drop a bit in July. We’ve also gotten better with turning off the powerstrips at night and before leaving for work in the morning.

Gas: We used 12 CCF which dropped from May’s 15 CCF. This is 15% of U.S. average. We showered alot more in June than previous months so again I am confused about this number. I like warm showers no matter what the season…so I don’t know why this dropped. As I mentioned last month, all our other water needs uses cold water: washing dishes, clothes, watering plants.

Garbage - Again forgot to weigh garbage. But it has gone up. Our worms died. So until we got some replacement worms (who are still in the processing of settling in), we didn’t want to put any  food waste in the compost bin and have it stink up the place. I should write about the fact that a compost bin smells (not always bad, but it smells) sometime. Does anyone know what a rainforest smells like? Because that is what the worm-compost advocates claimed a compost bin would smell like. I admit that this is why I was drawn to the idea despite the fact that I’ve never been in a rainforest and thus have no idea what a rainforest  smells like. Anyway…bottom line, I had to throw food waste in the garbage. The two of us eating what we do is actually too much waste for the worms. Until I read Chile’s wonderful account of making soup stock I didn’t think to save the veggie scraps, so I just composted it.

Water: Water usage went down and we used 2 cubic feet of water. I thought it would go up since we didn’t have much rain and I was watering my plants (cucumber, bell pepper, tomato) every day. But it didn’t. These numbers confound me. Also realized I’ve been calculating the numbers all wrong. The number in the table above is for both husband and me. Again: water here is used for drinking, cooking, bathing, washing clothes. Toilet flushes use grey water from the washer and bath. Since the water is soapy, the toilet is cleaned with every flush.

Consumer Goods: Oooo. The other biggie. I bought a toner for our laser printer (note: Staples takes old toners and gives a $15 coupon to be used for future purchases), another mouse for husband because…well, because he asked for it. I also bought some more menstrual pads from a woman on Etsy and the laptop. I also bought some toxic insecticide for the numerous houseflies that are driving me mad.  I’ll look more into natural remedies for the house fly (besides buying some praying mantis and frogs) now that life has returned to normal.

I just thought about the $10,000 average U.S. consumer purchases…what the hell do people buy every month for $10,000? Is Paris Hilton’s spendy habits included in here? It must be because I can’t figure out what on earth people could be buying that averages $10,000 every month. I mean how many fancy pants TVs could a single household own?

Edit: Ahem. I should quit complaining so readily. After reading JAM’s comment I realized that the amount is $10,000 per year and $833.33 per month. Table has been modified.

Food: Again. This is also off the charts in every way. For one, we ate out more in June than we did the entire year so far. We spent 11% of income on Dining.  Eating out not only included wonderful local-food supporting places like Farmacia but also crappy food places. I didn’t track specifics of what was organic and I bought alot of mexican soda this month. But I didn’t break everything down and its too hard to figure that out now. Suffice it to say Mr. Monbiot is shaking his head very sadly at me.

I have not been tracking the specifics of what I buy for food. So I just totalled up what I bought from the farmer’s market vs. the natural foods store to get the percentages. The farmer’s market provides me with local goods and food and the natural foods store provides me with organic stuff I can’t buy at the farmers’ market…such as rice. 

Here are my May 2008 Riot 4 Austerity numbers.

Gasoline: I am not tracking my public transit usage since I am well below the 90% guidelines. I use public transit to get to work and walk or ride my bike everywhere else. I haven’t been tracking my bike miles because its too much work to do so. I used to use gmap pedometer to track my mileage before (I don’t have one of those nifty little gadgets to attach to my bike). This was well in the winter when I didn’t ride much. But now I’m riding alot more, and its just a pain to track bike mileage. I rode to a dinner party recently and was pleased with myself because I didn’t get grease on my clothes.

Husband rides bike every where every day. I would ride my bike to work, except for two reasons.

1. I don’t have the additional money to buy more food which I would need if I was burning up more calories.

2. There is about 7 miles of bad ghetto between me and my job.  

Electricity: This is wind powered electricity so I get a payback per the 90% guidelines. My bill averages at around $60. The electricity hogs are the fridge and our desktop computers. I am hoping to purchase laptops in the next few months. This number also dropped from last month. The reason: husband is now working and not at home using electricity so much.

Gas: We used 15 CCF which is 18% of U.S. average. This is another drop from April of roughly 50%. Gas is used to heat the water in our house. I’m still confused about this number. We don’t shower every day and when I do shower I like a hot shower. But all our other water needs uses cold water: washing dishes, clothes, watering plants. I have read the suggestion online to turn off the water heater, but I’ve also read that some sort of bacteria growth can occur in the heater if its turned off. And its apparently poisonous/dangerous in some form. I don’t know if this is believable or not, but I don’t want to be stuck with a bill for a damaged water heater when I vacate this place, so I’m leaving the heater alone.

Garbage: Again I forgot to track garbage output. It isn’t any more than usual. We now put out a few full grocery bags every two weeks (ever since we began composting, we haven’t purchased garbage bags…we are now in the phase where we (meaning my husband) have been picking up garbage bags from the street (hanging from trees for example) and bringing it home so we can use it for our garbage. Cheese and butter come wrapped in plastic cling-wrap. I’ve read that in the olden days before plastic, cheese was packaged in wax. I should suggest that to the cheese makers.

Water: No change from last month. The amount was exactly the same. Water here is used for drinking, cooking, bathing, washing clothes. Toilet flushes use grey water from the washer and bath. Since the water is soapy, the toilet is cleaned with every flush.

Consumer Goods: The $29.19 spent breaks down as follows: $13 for shoe inserts for husband, $2.19 for a notebook and $14 for a handmade purse I bought on etsy.com. I wonder if I should start including TP purchases as a consumer good purchase.

Food: I had forgotten what wet goods meant per the riot guidelines. So I checked to see what it was. For some reason I had thought it meant things like oil for cooking. But it isn’t. From the page:

Wet goods - conventionally grown meat, fruits, vegetables, juices, oils, milk etc… transported long distances, and processed foods like chips, soda, potatoes. Also regular shampoo, dish soap, etc… And that no one should buy more than 5% of their food in this form. Right now, the above makes up more than 50% of everyone’s diet.

I have not purchased conventionally grown anything in a very, very long time. I bought some campbells tomato soup in January when I was sick and at work and I couldn’t eat anything. So I bought the soup from a chain grocery store (can’t remember the name). I realize tomato is one of the dirty dozen, but every "vegetarian" option had chicken stock in it and the thought of eating it really grossed me out.

I’ve been buying my soap from a store front at the Reading Terminal Market called Bee Natural. The soap is made from honey and appears to be made in Delaware. We’ve been using Dr. Bronner’s bar soap (the scent free one) to wash our dishes after reading about some other blogger (burbanmom?) using it. It works well. So now I don’t use the earth friendly dish washing soap that comes in a recycleable plastic container.

Additionally, although I have not bought any soda, this doesn’t mean I haven’t drunk any soda. The soda I (and husband) drank this past month was given as a reward for our niceness (as volunteers, good worker bees, etc). I usually drink water (even bottled water) if I’m caught unprepared at these events, but I just drank some soda and enjoyed the corn syrup goodness. Same rule applies for other junk food. We never (yes never) buy chips, snack foods when grocery shopping. Neither of us like it that much. But if its offered at a party, I’ll have some. And I am no saint. I was addicted to Pepsi at one point. Paying over $3,000 to fix my teeth (cavities) got rid of my addiction very quickly. I was also addicted to chewing up at one point in my life. But then I wore braces because according to my parents, I had horsey looking teeth, and since its difficult to chew gum while wearing braces, I quit chewing gum.

I also have some lotions that I purchased before I heard about the Riot project that I’m still using. I just can’t bring myself to toss it out, so I’m using it up and promising myself never to buy it again.  

I have not been tracking the specifics of what I buy for food. So I just totalled up what I bought from the farmer’s market vs. the natural foods store to get the percentages. The farmer’s market provides me with local goods and food and the natural foods store provides me with organic stuff I can’t buy at the farmers’ market…such as rice. 

Here are my April 2008 Riot 4 Austerity numbers.

Gasoline: I am not tracking my public transit usage since I am well below the 90% guidelines. I use public transit to get to work and walk or ride my bike everywhere else. Also thought I’d mention that I rarely car pool. (the last time I was in a car was in January 2008)

Electricity: This is wind powered electricity so I get a payback per the 90% guidelines. My bill averages at around $60. The electricity hogs are the fridge and our desktop computers. I am hoping to purchase laptops in the next few months.

Gas: This dropped from March’s 91.25 even though I’ve been showering more often that usual.

Garbage: I forgot to track garbage output. It isn’t any more than usual. We now put out a few full grocery bags every two weeks (ever since I began composting, I haven’t purchased garbage bags…we are now in the phase where we pick up grocery bags from the street and use it for our garbage), so in a way we’ve reduced how much garbage we put out. Our recycling bin was alot more than usual however. I’ve been recycling our beer bottles. Our garbage usually contains the following: random bits of plastic I cannot recycle, stuff tossed in our backyard by our kind neighbors, other junk.

Water: After I posted my March riot numbers, Karina wondered how my water consumption was so low since each person is expected to drink at least 15 gallons per month (based on the 8 glasses per day rule). Well I responded that both husband and I drank most of our water while at work. But the question did get me thinking. I do use the wash water to flush the toilet and do shower infrequently…but it still is a bit low. My reasoning now is that there is some flaw in the Water Dept.’s billing system. And I am not going to be the one alerting them to the fact that they might be underbilling me. So everyone shush about my water habits.

Consumer Goods: It was the sandals I purchased. It an expensive pair. If I were an outside observer observing my spending patterns I’d think that I love to spend a helluva lot of money on stuff that is otherwise inexpensive. Well I’m going to be keep plugging away at keeping my moral and ethics and other feel-goody emotions intact.

Food: The percentages are based on how much I spend on the food as this way of measuring made more sense to me. The food numbers are a bit off since I didn’t breakdown the grocery bill in April. For some reason April was a very busy month and I didn’t noodle around in Quicken as much I wanted to. May is a new month however.

I am really tired and sleepy and at work. Apologies for spelling mistakes, more than usual grammatical errors, etc.

A few weeks back when Crunchy Chicken introduced the challenge for May, I readily signed up. I was especially excited about turning off our ancient fridge and going without electricity. I thought: well my husband is unemployed so he can cook my food daily.

I was not expecting him to actually get a job, especially since his job applications were going into a big black hole.

Well he got a job and now he is working both the part time one and the full time (its via a temp agency) one for at least the next 2 months until we move. We decided to toss all his earnings at his student loan and continue to live on my income.

So we’ll be using the fridge since we cook our weekly meals once a week and store it in the fridge.

SF: I haven’t forgotten about the vegan meal ideas. Its in draft and very incoherent right now.

The other part that will be challenging will be no plastic. I still wind up getting plastic packaged stuff once in a while. This weekend I will be in NYC so I should remember to carry all my snacks and drinks with me so I don’t buy something packaged in plastic or styrofoam. I’m also going to try to check out restaurants focused on local foods.

I will also be taking a class later this month that runs for a few weeks so I should remember to be adequately prepared with the proper foods, drinks, chocolate, etc. 

I didn’t track transportation because I’m the only one in the household using public transit and previous months tracking showed that I am well under the riot goals. I walk or bike everywhere else. 

Electric use fell from 98.25 kwh (we use wind powered electricity) and its probably due to the Trim the Fat challenge - not using computer on weekends and saving candle light nights.

Gas heating fell from 67.65 therms…due to temperatures and less showering on our part. 

I read about an olive oil scandal when researching methods into how olive oil was made and decided to try out American made Olive Oil and purchased some in bulk. It was expensive.  Its the purchase that increased our oil usage.

Garbage went up from 4 lbs because we bought lots of juices in those non recyclable containers, plus there was other misc. trash lying around that we got rid of.

Water went up from 7.48 gallons/person. Not sure why. Neither of us drank any extra water or showered any more. This looks a bit fishy. Or maybe pharmaceutically

We didn’t purchase any consumer goods. I was able to avert purchasing a thumb drive by remembering that I had one lying around unused.

Food: We didn’t buy much local food, but we made sure that everything purchased was organic.

So it seems that Spring is here. Happy Spring! 

All this micromanaging is starting to get tedious. Or maybe I am sick of the cold weather.

Here is an explanation of the numbers in the table above:

1. Transportation - I am not sure I will be tracking transportation usage in March. I use public transit (or my legs or my bike) to go everywhere  and I am far below the 90% guidelines.

2. Electricy - I use the wind powered electricity so I get some sort of payback. And the electric usage is a bit high. One reason is because of our desktops. The other is that we haven’t changed all our perfectly working bulbs to the environmentally friendly kind. Also we have an ancient fridge that is a hog and I am not getting rid of the fridge for a more energy efficient one because I am a renter. Boo!

3. Heat + Cooking - I am tired of the winter so I am not quite as excited about freezing my buns anymore. Wearing layers is starting to get annoying. This morning I was so excited to not wear long johns for the first time in months because the weather is supposed to be pleasant. I am quite envious of arduous and her L.A. weather. Cooking indicates the amount of oil we use. I just noted what we purchased this month, not what we used.

4. Garbage - Here too we’re doing great. Not purchasing packaged food helps a ton. Our worms are a godsend in this area. Everybody should get worms.

5. Water - Using grey water to flush the toilet has helped alot. Especially our wallet. I don’t think I will be doing anything more to improve in this area either.

6. Consumer goods - One goal this year was to limit consumer goods. I don’t like the fact that the 90% goal is measured in terms of dollars. I’d rather it be measured in some other terms…such as recyclability. But I don’t know how one would measure it thataway. We didn’t buy anything in Feb…but in the summer we will be purchasing two bikes (Surly Long Haul Trucker is currently a strong contender) and will be selling/donating our existing bikes.

7. Food - The local food group is so low because I didn’t track where our cheese came from. And we eat alot of cheese. I’ve been trying out alot of goat cheese which always seem to be from Canada. We did purchase alot of food in bulk. The rest was organic. I went through our food purchase list over the weekend and realized that we purchased almost no nonorganic food.

I didn’t ride my bike much in Feb either:

2/02/08 - 14.5 miles  

2/15/08 -  4 miles

2/18/08 - 48.28 miles

The ride on 2/18 was on presidents’ day. We biked to Valley Forge and the weather was a little crazy. It was lovely when we started at 60 degree Farenheit. By the time we returned, we were biking in freezing rain/hail (because I had neglected to check the weather). It took me over an hour to warm up.   

My spreadsheet can be viewed here.

 I hope I did this right. Also hope the table above shows up okay. This is my first time using the spreadsheet which I got from the Riot yahoo group. In the food category, 48.65% of our groceries were not local. This number is not accurate because the groceries were purchased from a local non-chain store that does have bulk bins and carries local produce but I forgot to write down what specific items we were purchasing every trip. I know I got sea food from Iceland (I guess there is no mercury in their fish?) and a bottle of blood orange juice from Italy…but I forgot to write down the specifics. I’ll try to do a better job this month. 

Edit:  Posted the entry too soon.

The Consumer Goods category breaks down as follows:

I purchased a pair of new sneakers for $119. They are supposed to last 10 years and have thick soles. This is my most expensive pair of shoes ever. I also purchased a safety razors and blades for my husband to get away from using disposable razors (I got the Merker Classic Safety razor). Additionally I purchased my first mouse. The old one I was using was free from a job I worked at 6-7 years ago. I could have waited and purchased a used one…but didn’t. This category also includes cloth napkins (for dining), and dish scrubbers and a pyrex dish I got to take lunch to work. Its made of glass and carries 4 days worth of meals so I can take a large dish on Mondays and not worry about lunch for the rest of the week. And since I don’t mind eating the same thing for 4 day, its one less thing to worry about.

In January, I rode my bike only twice. Why?

1. It was really, really cold.

2. I was really, really sick for about 2 weeks so I didn’t go anywhere.  

I also didn’t ride very much. Here are the numbers:

1/18/08 - 4.7 miles 

1/21/08 - 8.7 miles (25 degree Fahrenheit)

Ok. All January I tracked as much as I could. I think I tracked everything, but its in various places. So here is the first installment. Its on google spreadsheets. It tracks my public transit use because I wanted to see how much gasoline I used in public transit every year. I work four 10 hour days, so that is why there are many "no work" days. And yes, its quite tiring. I spend most Fridays catching up on sleep. I also tracked all the times I ate out. I didn’t track all non-local food purchases used in cooking, because that would be a bit much and I didn’t think to do it until half way through the month. I will do it in February. You’ll notice I take all sorts of public transit. This is how I spice up my life. I usually walk to the subway station except on days when it is really, really cold and my face or toes hurt. Then I catch the bus to get to the subway. There are half a dozen ways to get to work so depending on my mood I try them all out. I also live far from work (1 hour away - one way) and the subway in Philly is not extensive. All my "didn’t go anywhere" entries mean I didn’t use public transit.

I spent alot of time at home because I was either sick/and or it was too cold to go anywhere. I didn’t track where my husband went and what he ate and where he ate it. But since he quit his job, he has been busy cleaning and scrubbing our place and turning into a domestic diva while making sure he spends no money (which includes sitting in a cold house with the heat turned off). He turned the heat on about twice this month because the temperature really dipped and with out single paned windows our rooms are quite chilly.

I will post the other micromaneged things later today or over the weekend.  

One thing I realized now that my husband and I cook all our meals from scratch is the sheer amount of flour we use. We use it to bake breads, pies, etc. And since we will be living on very little money this year (for a variety of reasons), I plan on using locally grown/milled spelt flour and also plan on using regular all purpose flour because spelt flour costs $3.95 (IIRC) for a 2lb bag. That 2 lbs yields about 3 large pizzas. Which is economical pizza wise (if I compare it with the price of store bought pizza)…but then I have not been able to calculate the cost of our toppings per pizza which usually include mushrooms, cheese, tomatoes(or tomato sauce), and whatever else is suitable.

Anyway, the point of this post is flour. Not pizza.

I purchased 25 lbs of flour from King Arthur’s website. This purchase included shipping, and cost me $22.45. Shipping cost 6.95 and it will be shipped via USPS. Very rough calculations show me that the distance traveled from King Arthur’s base of Norwich, VT to me in Philadelphia, PA is 304 miles. So that is about $0.43/mile. No idea on how many gallons of gasoline were used to ship it to me. Since King Arthur is 100% owned by its employees I guess their employees are paid well. But I was curious on where the flour comes from. For some reason I found it a bit hard to imagine wheat growing in Vermont. So I emailed King Arthur’s customer service to find out where their grain was grown. Their response:

The wheat grown for King Arthur Flour is grown in a number of locations but not in Vermont. Most of the hard red winter wheat is grown in the Midwest; soft spring wheat is grown in the Southeast. We process both naturally grown wheat and organic wheat. http://www.kingarthurflour.com/flour/home.html

So first the wheat is grown in the midwest, then sent to Vermont, and then sent to me. I wonder if I could just buy the ground wheat from someone in the midwest. Or maybe I should get a grain grinder and buy the wheat from someone in the midwest.

There is no real point to this post, except when I originally started this post (a few weeks back), I wanted to do some sort of calculation on how much oil was spent getting flour from soil to my house. But I don’t know how to calculate that. I also wondered how I could be guaranteed that there wasn’t anything fishy about the grain in the flour (GMO, fish genes in the wheat, etc). But I will excuse this post because I am still sick, and when I am sick my thoughts are very rambly and pointless.

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.

1. Gasoline. Average American usage is 500 gallons PER PERSON, PER YEAR. A 90 percent reduction would be 50 gallons PER PERSON, PER YEAR.
* No reduction in emissions for ethanol or biodiesel.
* Public transportation and Waste Veggie Oil Fuel are deemed to get 100 mpg, and should be calculated accordingly.

By the above calculation, I estimate I use 50.35 gallons per year using public transit + bus. This is based on working 5 days/week every single week of the year. Which I don’t do. I also don’t own a car, and walk or ride my bicycle everywhere.

2. Electricity. Average US usage is 11,000 kwh PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR, or about 900 kwh PER HOUSEHOLD PER MONTH. A 90% reduction would mean using 1,100 PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR or 90 kwh PER HOUSEHOLD PER MONTH

For the past two months I’ve had a roommate. Total in household: 3. Average of past two months = 231.5 kwH

3. Heating and Cooking Energy - this is divided into 3 categories, gas, wood and oil. Your household probably uses one of these, and they are not interchangeable. If you use an electric stove or electric heat, this goes under electric usage.

* Natural Gas (this is used by the vast majority of US households as heating and cooking fuel). For this purpose, Propane will be calculated as the same as natural gas. Calculations in therms should be available from your gas provider.
* US Average Natural Gas usage is 1000 therms PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR. A 90% reduction would mean a reduction to 100 therms PER HOUSEHOLD PER YEAR

Average from a previous apartment was about 4 therms/month which is 48/year. Not sure what it will be at our current place: a house. Also we use the oven more often than in the previous place because we got rid of our small toaster oven.

4. Garbage - the average American generates about 4.5 lbs of garbage PER PERSON, PER DAY. A 90% reduction would mean .45 lbs of garbage PER PERSON, PER DAY.

So this is nearly 1 lb for both me and my husband per day. That is about 7 lbs per week. I think our garbage really varies. Most of our garbage is packaging (I am not the best recycler in the world) and paper and prior to composting: food scraps which was the bulk of the weight. I would guess it was 7 lbs per week. I know they weighed less than our weights.

5. Water. The Average American uses 100 Gallons of water PER PERSON, PER DAY. A 90% reduction would mean 10 gallons PER PERSON, PER DAY.

This would be really goofy. Most places we’ve lived at had water included in the rent. I don’t know how people use 100 gallons per person per day, but I think we barely touch 5 gallons. I suppose I can ask my landlord for the bill on this.

6. Consumer Goods. The best metric I could find for this is using money. A Professor at Syracuse University calculates that as an average, every consumer dollar we spend puts .5 lbs of carbon into the atmosphere. This isn’t perfect, of course, but it averages out pretty well.

The average American spends 10K PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR on consumer goods, not including things like mortgage, health care, debt service, car payments, etc… Obviously, we recommend you minimize those things to the extent you can, but what we’re mostly talking about is things like gifts, toys, music, books, tools, household goods, cosmetics, toiletries, paper goods, etc… A 90% cut would be 1,000 dollars PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR

We’ve never spent more than $500 on consumer goods per year. The most was in 2005 where I bought a bicycle for $800+, a computer I put together for about $1,000. Remaining years we average about $500. But I’ll shoot for $500.

7. Food. This was by far the hardest thing to come up with a simple metric for. Using food miles, or price gives what I believe is a radically inaccurate way of thinking about this. So here’s the best I can do. Food is divided into 3 categories.

Thus, if you purchase 20 food items in a week, you’d use 14 home or locally produced items, 5 bulk dry items, and only 1 processed or out of season thing.

I am now mostly vegan (occasionally eat cheese), and husband has cut down on the occasional meat as well. This has been good on our colons. We recently stopped buying juices. So our wet goods come in the form of soy milk/creamer. We eat alot of beans and drink alot of coffee. Have to figure out the numbers. I have never calculated that. I am not sure what to do about food when Farmer’s Market season if over…but this is something I need to get numbers on.