Everyone struggles to know how best to start making a difference at a personal level.
This is how we started our quest to reduce our personal CO2 footprint. In our 2 person household we focused on 3 areas we thought contributed most and where we felt we could make a step change. I’ll share how we got on in a few short articles.
- We’ve no mains gas at our house so our hot water & cooking was from oil. We were using 7 litres of oil per day making it an obvious area to prioritise.
- My commute was 50 miles a day in a diesel SUV, coincidentally also burning 7 litres of fossil fuel per day.
- Milk was the third candidate as we got through 2 litres each day.
We audited our consumption and calculated the annual cost plus the ‘CO2 carbon budget’ to give us a start point against which we could track progress.
In case you’re having trouble visualising it, this is what a tonne of CO2 looks like. We were amazed we were making more than 12 of these big bad boys every year!
This was back in 2018; our mission was suddenly very clear...reduce the amount of CO2 we were producing andat no extra cost.
