Your Carbon Footprint

Without necessarily knowing it, over the course of a day, week, month and year the way you live in your home will contribute to carbon emissions. Here are a few lifestyle changes to incorporate into your daily life to reduce your carbon emissions:

As a household:

• Adjust your home routine to improve comfort and reduce energy use:
  • Open windows in summer at night
  • Create shade in the summer, and remove it in the winter
  • Draw curtains at night
  • Turn off appliances at the plug when they’re not in use 
  • Switch off the lights, take showers not baths, use a shorter, cold cycle when you do washing and leave mixer taps in the cold position to avoid accidental hot water usage
• Minimise waste — ‘refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle’
  • Reduce your food miles by buying local produce
  • Repurpose. Find a new use for something, buy second hand clothing or trade your waste 
  • Recycle & REDcycle soft plastic at your local supermarket
  • Use a reusable coffee cup & bring your own shopping bags 
• Compost your food waste. Did you know - when food and garden wastes break down without fresh air they create a mixture of gases including the damaging greenhouse gas, methane?
• Grow some of your own food
• Consume products that are not made or delivered using fossil fuels 
• Avoid plastics. Most plastics are made from petrochemicals, and they break up not down - they stay on the planet for longer than most of our lifetimes! 
• Avoid buying cling wrap - use reusable containers and make bees wax wraps! 
• Carpool with colleagues
• Walk more, drive less
• Choose low carbon foods by buying products that are in season and grown locally
• Make your garden more green. Cut down on fertiliser and repellents or get a water barrel to collect rainwater
• Plant trees. This will offset emissions you haven’t managed to avoid! Check out a handy tree calculator here
• Travel by train, not plane
• When buying new products, make sure you’re purchasing quality goods from certified sustainable (e.g. Good Environmental Choice Australia) and socially preferred (e.g. Fairtrade) sources

As a business:

• Encourage walk or cycle to work schemes for employees
• Incentivise car pooling 
• Consider installing solar panels on your office or factory buildings
• Increase the efficiency of office lighting
• Put a recycling scheme in place
• Go paperless
• Minimise single use plastic within the workplace or with your products
• Optimise your heating and cooling systems 
• Find out how you can get support and credibility for your efforts, like applying for Climate Action Certification

‘Carbon zero’ or ‘carbon neutral’ refers to buildings or homes that have no net emissions.

In order to work towards a more sustainable future we need to get rid of or substantially reduce the amount of carbon and other greenhouse gases being emitted into the atmosphere. Creating a carbon zero or carbon negative home could significantly reduce carbon emissions in the future. 

The average australian family generates 18 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent gases each year! Thats at least one-fifth of Australia's greenhouse gases. Therefore, what we all do at home really does matter! 

Majority of average Australian families' emissions come from their vehicles. The technology for electric, hydrogen and hybrid vehicles is evolving quite quickly to address this source of emissions. The next largest emissions source is water heating, followed by lights and home heating and cooling (ie. electricity and/or gas).  

The two most common ways of addressing these emissions are renewable power (like solar) or paying slightly more for green power through your power provider. Reducing the amount of energy you use and then increasing the efficiency of your home is often the most cost-effective place to start. 

Achieving a carbon zero home requires careful design and planning. Some emissions will be unavoidable with current technology and some might not be financially viable.  This is where an offset is required to mitigate the impact of your emissions.   

To offset your remaining emissions that are unavoidable emissions, you can purchase certified offsets which pay for carbon emission reducing activities (eg. tree planting, human assisted regeneration, grazing management) or you could plant your own trees! For the average Australian household to fully offset, without making any reductions in emissions, we would need to plant approximately 90 trees per year to be carbon neutral! Your local environment will thank you too as there are many other benefits of planting more trees.  

Fun Fact
 

Did you know that Mangroves have been found to absorb carbon at a rate two to four times greater than mature tropical forests (Fatoyinbo et al, 2017)? For every ten Mangrove trees that's around 3 tonnes of CO2 per year!