CONSUMPTION

As you will see in other posts (especially on waste), we tend to minimise our purchases of non-essential items. We don't live the lives of Trappist monks, but we just don't have the desire to buy all of the stuff that those nice marking folks try to sell us. No matter how much brainwashing they try . . .

Our favourite thing is to try and apply this to other families too, espcially where gift giving is more of a token or a nice thought than anything else. For example, Xmas is such an orgy of consumption. We figure, why buy someone some more sugar/salt/fat laden goodies at Xmas when they've probably got lots already. Or those $10-15 presents that cost lots of carbon but may end up in a closet for years (candles, soaps, oils etc.).

So we now buy charity gift cards of chickens or seeds or goats or whatever (Oxfam is just one such example), that someone somewhere in the world who's living in poverty could REALLY use, even when it's such a small gift. We've done that for a few years now. We'd like to apply it to childrens parties, instead of buying scary plastic monsters and stuff for all of those boys. But we don't know what the kids would make of a chicken card - perhaps the same as a new set of underware . . . boring? But it's a form of awareness raising we like! See this article for more on this idea.

We're also trying to bring up our own children to expect less (especially electronic goods and toys) and instead value what they have.

Other things we do

• rarely buy clothing as adults, though the children need changes of clothing as they grow.
• take advantage of hand-me-downs from friends and use op shops when possible.
• send out old clothing (usually very well looked after) and toys etc. to op shops or again to friends.
• use local Freecycle networks to give away unwanted items.
• use eBay to sell unwanted items.

Ecological footprint

We've just recalculated ours using the EPA Victoria calculator. It's user friendly but does not capture a lot of the efforts we've made to reduce our impact. It's also a little outdated at 4+ years old: http://www.epa.vic.gov.au/ecologicalfootprint/globalfootprint/index.asp

Our result was it takes the equivalent of 1.8 Earths to support members of our family. That's 3.2 'global hectares'. The average Australian requires 7.7 and Victorians 8.1 according to this EPA Vic doc. So we are around 60% lower than typical families. See also this chart on the historical trend for Australia. The same web page shows the world average is around 1.5 Earths required to support humans.

Interestingly, at the end of the survey, we wondered what we could do to reduce our impact, so we ticked all of the boxes for suggested changes to our 'lifestyle'. The only one that really made much difference was eating less animal based foods. Took us down to 1.5 plants. Not encouraging really, or at least not a great tool to explore what else we can do. So it's rather generic, but an interesting exercise. Granted too that it's not easy to develop such tools to really represent the ecological impacts of our lives.

 

Links

• Global Footprint Network