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Do Ya Bit - 10:10 Climate Advice

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EcoMatters can help you make climate friendly lifestyle choices. Do Ya Bit advisors are here to give you advice to help reduce your carbon emissions.

 

Some help to get you started

Big impact choices:

1. Fly less

When you holiday, try to avoid short-stay long-haul trips around the planet. To see how much carbon an international flight emits compared to a domestic NZ car or bus journey, visit the free CarboNZero travel calculator.  

2. Drive less

On your own, especially on the short trips of a few kms in town where you could instead walk, cycle, take a bus, or share vehicle use. Try to get to work without the car at least one day every week. Perhaps use this as an excuse to increase exercise and pick the nicest weather so that it becomes a good habit. Car engines burn more petrol or diesel per km when starting up and moving slowly on city streets and create more air pollution then. 

3.  Reduce the power bill

or at least cut consumption so that expected further price rises will not hurt so much!  Each 'unit' of electricity is one kilowatt of power for one hour of time and you get only four of these to a dollar, so they soon add up. A significant part of NZ power supply comes from burning coal and gas, so until we generate electricity from all-renewable sources, electricity efficiency helps reduce our carbon footprint.  

Energy wasters at home include: 

  • appliances such as TVs left switched on 'standby' overnight, 
  • filament light bulbs (compact fluorescent bulbs are 4x more efficient, and last longer),
  • old fridges with thin insulation and leaky door seals,
  • large plasma TVs use more power in use than LED screens,
  • hot water tanks with thin insulation (add a tank jacket if not labeled 'A grade'),
  • high flow showers
  • draughts around doors and windows - use weather-strips and foam seals to reduce these,
  • too little insulation above the ceiling. 

From previous bills, note your monthly power consumption units during last year and compare with the bills for this year as they arrive. See how many units you can trim off the total?

4. Switch winter heating fuels

Move from coal, oil or gas (all are global-warmers) to renewable wood or mostly-renewable electricity, preferably with the added efficiency of a heat pump that transfers 3x more energy, from the air or soil source, into your home than it requires to operate it. Now that's efficient!

Don't use this heat pump for summer cooling, however - it's far better for the planet to use shade plus ventilation to achieve the cooling you seek. Deciduous trees on the West of the house can help, or climbing plants on a frame, such as beans or vine, if there's no space for trees.

5. Eat more healthily 

Prefer fruit and vegetables from NZ to those which have been shipped or flown across the planet and enjoy seasonal variety in your cooking. Enjoy meat free meals several times a week. Meat and dairy production requires (per kilogram of food) high oil and fertiliser inputs, winter feed inputs and also electricity for water pumping. Cattle and sheep also produce significant amounts of methane gas from their upper digestive tracts - they burp it into the air.  Meat production releases five times as many greenhouse gases per kilogram of food than producing grains or vegetable oils. 

Seed, nut, grain, and bean proteins are more carbon-efficient to produce and as those foods also provide roughage and are not as often accompanied by saturated fats as meat, they are  healthy food. Try out some vegetarian recipes and discover taste delights that you've been missing. 

6. Buy less junk  

Good quality items that last have a lower carbon footprint over time than the short-life, throw-away plastic stuff and cheap clothing fashions with which we clutter our homes. To make things last longer, consider clothing repair, furniture renovation, shoe re-soling and other creative re-use from internet purchases, friends or Op Shops.  

Throw less into landfill because you are still using it, or if not needed, sell, swap, or give it to someone who will use it.  You can find examples of groups who could take it off your hands (from Sustainable Christchurch group) at www.recyclingplus.org.nz . Why waste expensive cupboard and floor space storing un-used stuff?!!  

Finally, your lifestyle's impact on natural systems:

7. Value water 

It takes a lot of energy to heat water, and then we squander it daily in deep baths or spa pools, so develop the refreshing habit of a quick shower instead. If your shower flow rate is more than 9 litres a minute, replace that shower head with a low flow model or get a flow restrictor. This will give you a shower that feels just as good but uses a lot less hot water. 

In the garden, stop water flooding onto paths and drives, or evaporation from sprinklers left running in the heat of the day - all that drinking quality H2O had to be cleaned and pumped to reach your house, at considerable energy cost, so cold tap water has a carbon footprint too! 

8. Feed growing veges with compost  

Whether you make compost to use at home or send compostable wastes to a city processing facility, and buy in compost, you are returning materials to the natural cycle of decay. This releases essential nutrients including nitrogen and phosphorus for the living soil and crops. It’s a sorry waste to send compostable food scraps, peelings, prunings and grass mowings to landfill. Buried in the landfill, deprived of oxygen, they break down to make methane gas, which is a greenhouse gas far more damaging than carbon dioxide and this gas, unlike the solid waste, will eventually leak out of the tip, unless it's tightly capped!  

If you do not have a garden, consider using EM Bokashi or a worm farm, and offer what you create to a community garden or a gardening neighbour, who can use it, in return for some produce! In Timaru, the idea is being taken further with an Edible Garden Group who link up people without gardens who'd like to grow food with people who have unused land but no time or ability to garden. Similar ideas are developing in Auckland - visit the following website Out of our backyards. 

9. Trim and efficient footprint  

The floor-size of New Zealand houses, per occupant, has been increasing. If you're a home owner and considering a move, do you need as much space? Will you use it all well or just as a visible 'trophy' of your supposed success?  What if large houses fall from fashion as energy-guzzlers, like the large SUV cars are doing right now?  

Real value comes from houses that work well for their users, ones that are well insulated to retain  warmth in winter and to be cool in summer, that gather the Northern sunshine and are able to store it overnight, have space for a vege patch, and carbon-storing trees, not acres of lawns for petrol-guzzling, fume-emitting mowers. 

What's it adding up to?

10. Feel happier  

By the end of this year you could be healthier - your rent or mortgage debt could be smaller, you exercise more than you used to, you have sampled some new recipes, made new friends from the car-sharing and swapping stuff and shopping at the farmers market. You've not been into a plastic junk shop for months... and you know that you are a small part of the global effort to prevent catastrophic climate change. Your children are talking to you again - after all, it's their future we were squandering with this old fashioned way of living.

More information at: 

http://www.sustainableliving.org.nz for evening classes around NZ, & detailed action guides. 

http://www.1010NZ.org (coming soon, hosted by Celsias) 

http://www.celsias.co.nz for practical action ideas, and you can post your own ideas there.

http://www.projectlitefoot.org for inspiration from NZ sportspeople who cut carbon by 20%, 30%... and you can measure your own carbon impact: http://www.projectlitefoot.org/your-impact/

Monthly or annual carbon calculators at http://www.carboNZero.co.nz

http://hot-topic.co.nz/ for daily updates on climate science and reviews of the policy debate.

http://www.transitiontowns.org.nz to help think about how different life would be without cheap fuel and changing weather patterns in a warmer climate.

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