Carbon footprint improvements

A local magazine tasked me with finding out how much my CO2 footprint improved in the last 10 years and suggest what changes I would need to undertake in order to achieve what is considered to be my sustainable allowance of 2 tonnes.

Most of my lifestyle energy changes over the last 10 years have been positive ones including reducing how much I drive, reducing travel abroad, how I shower, shave and wash the dishes. The household also made some positive changes including how we heat water, light the rooms and how much we heat the house.

I travelled abroad just twice in the last 5 years – a significant improvement on times past.

For heating the house my household no longer attempts to be as warm throught the house.   In winter, bedrooms are 14-16°C and living room is 18-19°C in the evening.  When cold we put on an extra layer.  We now use 750L of oil per year between 3 people compared to 1000L in the past. We also save a bit by turning down the boiler thermostat to 65°C.

For electricity we rarely use the immersion so I wash dishes either without hot water or with remaining hot water from the kettle and the odd boiled kettle for harder jobs. I rinse and steep dishes and pots immediately after eating which minimises hot water and washing liquid requirements and steep pots and pans on the electric hob rings immediately after cooking as the rings are still hot. On the odd occasion when the hot water storage cylinder is needed, I use the boiler instead of using the electric immersion to heat it.
The electric shower is the biggest carbon consumer in the house so I use the lowest of the 3 power settings which saves over 50%. We replaced all the light bulbs in the house with CFL lights and for cooking I try to use a single ring with a steamer to do most of the cooking work. We moved to Airtricity which claimed to use 66% renewable energy, but in the last bill they changed this claim to 24% – still much better than the competition so despite concern over this dramatic drop we’ve stayed with them.

For food changes, I went from being a meat eater to about 80% vegetarian and buy local if possible. I also buy a good bit more organic food and have started to grow some of my own.

On the negative side I changed to driving a bigger and less efficient car (from 40MPG to 35MPG) in 2002. Also, since about 2005 we’ve only 3 people sharing the house (it was 4 prior to that) so this has reversed all our heating oil CO2 savings.

Overall I improved my Carbon footprint from 5.88 tonnes to 4.68 tonnes, positioning me considerably better than the average Irish citizen’s 9.8 tonnes. The world’s poorer citizens are helping to keep the global average down to 4 tonnes. However, that’s still twice the sustainable target of 2 tonnes.

 I’ve identified four things I can do, some not so difficult and others involving major lifestyle change So here they are:

Being into innovation, I’m hoping sustainable and affordable technology will advance to help bridge us that gap within a few years. That mightn’t happen quickly enough, so perhaps my past and identified future improvements this article can empower you to make some changes to your carbon balance.

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