Can you live a 1.5c life? Pt 3

Part one of this series of posts on the 1.5c life challenge is here. Part two is here.

Let's wrap up the first email of Australian Ethical's 1.5c lifestyle challenge (it's now over three weeks into the challenge after all!) so I can move onto the more meaty topics of future emails...

I'm not going to spend so long breaking down the numbers on the final actions from the first challenge email, mostly because it's hard for me to figure out my own exact numbers or translate them to the whole country. I'm just going to examine how much potential they broadly have, as individual actions or as collective solutions, and the personal ways I'm trying to up my game.

Part three of the challenge is: keep your home well insulated. The individual actions in the challenge are:

•	draught-proof your home with door snakes and curtains

•	invest in carpets and rugs – this helps stop heat escaping through the floor

•	close off unused rooms in winter and help to reduce heat loss.

•	close curtains and blinds to keep the heat in or block the sun out

The connection of heating, cooling and insulation to climate change is well understood in Australia, especially since the Rudd government's "pink batts scheme" which resulted in the deaths of four workers and became a political wedge for the climate-denying opposition.

We already did almost all the things on this list - as residents of a north/west facing rental apartment, we have no choice but to control our temperature passively. We have used a small portable A/C unit in the past, but this apartment has no compatible windows, so in the summer, all we can do is try and shade ourselves and catch a coastal cross-breeze when we can. And in the winter, our glass sliding doors catch the afternoon sun, keeping us cozy so long as there's even a hint of daylight. Our electicity use barely spiked during a cold wet spell last year. The only thing on the list we haven't been doing is using a door-snake to prevent a draught; I've improvised one out of a felt blanket for our front door, and although May has been unseasonably cold for coastal NSW, we haven't had to fire the heater up yet.

I guess I am living a 1.5c lifestyle on this front, then. But I am not going to even calculate how much difference it would make if every Australian lived like I did, because the concept is fundamentally flawed. Our ability to live with a low heating & cooling footprint is intimately connected with the design of our buildings and the appliances installed during construction.

The Beyond Zero Emissions Stationary Energy Plan discusses what an important role buildings, temperature control and insulation have to play in getting Australia to a zero carbon energy grid. For most of our country, the biggest challenge to getting renewables in the grid is the evening peak, as I discussed a little in part 1 of this challenge. Right as the sun is losing intensity or setting, we get home from work, and switch on the air conditioning and cook our largest meal of the day. We have ended up this way, in the plan's words, because "the cost of electricity in Australia has historically been low compared to other developed nations, allowing lowest initial-cost building practices and inefficient design to persist as the norm." So long as electricity is cheap, it's cheaper, simpler and easier to switch on the A/C and pay the annual cost than it is to build our houses well in the first place.

Taking passive, low-energy measures like those of the 1.5c challenge can help us to flatten that peak, but they can only do so much when most of our homes are built like "glorified tents". Not every Australian can live within 1km of the ocean like we do, and catch a cooling afternoon breeze. The BZE plan, on the other hand, identifies policy-level actions which could reduce electricity consumption from buildings by 36%: a program for double-glazing and insulation installation (like the infamous pink batts debacle), and totally phasing out gas as a source of heat and cooking in favour of efficient electrical appliances like induction cooktops and heat pumps. 

These higher-impact actions are difficult to take as an individual working within a market-based system. The cost of replacing an old cooktop and water heater with newer, more efficient models is prohibitively high; the only people I know who have done it are those who have made the decision (and had the means) to renovate their kitchens. Better insulating your house has a lower initial cost and will pay for itself in reduced energy consumption - but so long as natural gas or an inefficient electrical appliance is the source of your heat or cooling, greenhouse gas emissions will still result.

If you are a renter like us and approximately 30% of Australians, you might be able to negotiate with your landlord to split the cost of these upgrades - but if you don't own the asset and can't be sure you'll live there long enough to recoup even part of the cost on lower bills, why would you bother to invest in upgrading it? As much of a disaster as it was, we need a new pink batts scheme, or other society-wide measures to retrofit insulation and efficiency measures.

So long as our housing stock remains inefficient, individual actions cannot reduce emissions within the level of a 1.5c trajectory. Most of the houses currently in supply or being built will still be around by 2050, by which time we should clearly have reached net zero. Even today, 80% of houses are currently being built to the minimum standard of efficiency, which isn't even cost-effective over the life of the building. Australia will require collective actions on the level of policy - especially improving minimum building standards and. phasing out gas as a source of energy - to improve our efficiency and bring ourselves to net zero.

As far as heat generation is concerned, there is a significant untapped resource in Australian cities near industrial hubs, too: cogeneration. While in Australia, most studies have examined the use of gas or biogas inputs for cogeneration, there are examples overseas of capturing waste energy from other means - for example, Sweden harnesses the landfill gas I discussed in the last post to burn for both heat and electricity, while Copenhagen is almost fully heated by a centralised system that captures the waste heat from the city's electrical plants and circulates it as hot water. These systems require municipal or governmental action, even if they are broadly popular.

For the sake of brevity, I'm going to leave that point there, and quickly address the final target of the first week's challenge: reducing your consumption. The personal actions are:

•	swap or borrow clothes if you need something new

•	if you see something you want, wait three weeks before buying it – if you’re still thinking about it, then buy it.

•	try not to buy anything new for a month

I work in sports fashion retail, so I know how much of a problem fast fashion is. The bread and butter of our business is people who shop for new outfits for exercise and daily wear multiple times a year. All the extra production this leads to means each item has a higher carbon footprint. Since the year 2000, fashion consumption has gone up by 60%, and it now accounts for 5% of global emissions - more than shipping or aviation.

I'm not going to try and figure out how much I could save or how much difference it would make if every Australian took the challenge on this one, mostly for brevity. It is more of a marginal contribution than electricity, food waste or even household heating, but could do more than individuals voluntarily avoiding flights - like the climate activist Greta Thunberg has famously started doing.

I'm just going to say that, with a little reflection, I'm probably not living a 1.5c lifestyle right now, given the amount I consume. So I've started on the three week rule - even setting myself google calendar reminders once it's been three weeks and I can review if I really want to buy something - and sofar, it's helped me to avoid impulse buying several things, including clothes and household appliances.

Perhaps in a few weeks, I can review how this has gone (as well as my food waste reduction efforts). But let's move on from this first week of challenges for now. Next time, I'll write more about the second email, on ethical investment for the climate.

Can you live a 1.5c life? Pt 2

Part one of this series of posts on the 1.5c life challenge is here. Part three is here.

So, I can tick off "renewable electricity" from my challenge. Let's have a look at the rest of the first email from Australian Ethical. What other personal actions can we take to live a 1.5c life, and do they match the science?

Number two on Australian Ethical's 1.5c lifestyle challenge is reducing food waste. This is a big one, and it's been at the forefront of Australia's mind ever since the ABC's War on Waste show aired back in 2017.

I'm going to get very concrete on this one; I'd like to think I do as much as is reasonable on this front, but I've never gotten specific. Am I actually doing enough? How do we stack up?

The average Australian, according to a report prepared for the Department of the Environment and Energy in 2018, produces 540kg of total waste, of which about 45% is recycled. That makes me ask - exactly how much is our two-person household producing?

This much.

This was about 300g of our household rubbish (yes, I got out the kitchen scales and weighed it). I might take out this bin every couple of days on average, so for simplicity's sake, let's say we produce 1kg of rubbish to landfill a week, or 52kg a year. Let's say the amount we throw away to landfill in bins at work or in public is the same again; 104kg total landfill a year. Much less than the 486kg an average household of two would produce. So far, pretty good!

The reycling weighs in a little more, at around 2kg. Again, I'd normally take this bag out every couple of days, so let's say that's 5kg a week, or 260kg a year.

Let's not forget the soft plastics! This bag is about two weeks worth for us (we don't recycle every single scrap that comes our way, only the things that wouldn't take a lot of effort to clean food from). That's 220g, or about 6kg a year. Our kerbside recycling service doesn't accept soft plastic, so this gets dropped off to collection bins at the supermarket. With extra work, we could probably recycle a little more, and shave another kilo or two off our landfill.

And last, the star of the show: our food waste to compost. It has the daily fruit peel and coffee grounds, as well as scraps from dinner. Since we moved into our current apartment we've been composting almost all our food scraps - first through saving them up and delivering to a neighbour I found on the ShareWaste app, and then, once the current pandemic brought that system to a halt, through our own Bokashi compost bin in the basement. This is a relatively small container for us - some nights after dinner there is an entire bowl full of scraps. It weighs 300g, so let's say on average we compost 2.5kg a week, or 130kg a year. If we weren't composting it, our household landfill waste would be more than doubled!

So my estimate of our total waste is an even 500kg a year, of which 53% percent is recycled, and 26% composted. Well under half as much as the average Australian produces, and composting the food waste and adding it to soil can increase soil carbon by 12% - actually drawing down some of the emissions involved in producing the food we eat or other sources. Not too shabby!

In the spirit of the challenge, though, I need to ask myself - how can we do better?

I am already on the composting, and usually shop to a list to avoid buying things I don't need. But Australian Ethical's tips include a couple of new ideas for me - especially storing carrots with the tops cut off and celery in water. I never seem to use a whole head of celery before at least some has gone to waste! And reading around elsewhere I've learnt that cucumbers should be stored at room temperature, not in the fridge - in fact, there's a good half a cucumber that went bad in the above photo of my compost. But citrus is the other way around - I've been keeping it in the fruit bowl when it should go in the fridge!

So, I've picked up a few practical tips to up my food storage game. Taking the challenge, I think we could reduce our waste to 90kg to landfill and 120kg composted a year.

What would happen to our greenhouse gas emissions if every Australian took this challenge, reduced their household waste from 560kg to 178kg?

The total waste generated at the local & council level in the 2018 DOE report was 13.8mt. With the per capita amount reduced threefold, that would come down to 4.38mt. This would result in a major reduction of landfill gas emissions - a major source of carbon dioxide as well as methane, which has a shorter lifespan in the atmosphere than CO2, but a much higher impact over a shorter time-frame. It's hard to calculate how much of an impact landfill gas has overall, but the less rotting food waste, the less methane.

Quantifying food waste emissions, a 2017 study in the Journal of Cleaner Production has shown that it accounts for 6% of Australia's GHG emissions - 57,507 Gg CO2-eq. annually - as well as 9% of our water use.

Do these personal actions, cutting down food waste in the home, match the science for averting 1.5c of global warming?

As with buying renewable power, the shortest answer is yes. The longer answer is a little more complicated. Reading into the facts about food waste globally, we can see that, in developed nations, the share of food waste at the consumer end grows, while in the global south, more occurs from loss at the point of production or in the supply chain. A Food and Agriculture Office of the United Nations (FAO) report into food waste in 2013 found that, in North America and Oceania, food waste from consumers was 40%.

The top three bars are developed nations; section in aqua is waste by consumers

For Australia, the 2018 DOE report documents 16.1mt of agricultural waste which is managed on-site; this is more than all our current municipal landfill production, but it doesn't document how this waste is managed by the agriculture industry. The report also doesn't estimate the impact of food waste generated on-farm, and in many upstream food processing operations; however, worldwide, it is estimated that 50% of all fruit grown is wasted, and, as we saw in the War on Waste, much of that does occur by simply leaving food to rot. One of the chief climate impacts of the current pandemic has been a sudden spike in this kind of food waste, as closure of restaurants and large commercial purchasers have resulted in a sudden oversupply of that part of the market - even though there have been shortages on supermarket shelves!

Milk being tipped down the drain during the Covid-19 lockdowns

However, the food that reaches consumers is the most highly processed (and valuable) of all food waste. The 2017 study found that around half of all of Australia's food-waste emissions came from consumers - 2.8% of total food emissions - while 3.1% of total food emissions were from industrial food waste. Food eaten domestically accounts for 14.2% of total emissions, food exported 20.9% (and if the ratios are the same as in Australia, then at least a third of those emissions are going to food which ends up being wasted too).

And there is a double footprint for this wasted food; the remaining 59% of agricultural GHG emissions come from non-food products, such as the industrial processes required to farm and transport food. Composting can turn the 5.9% of greenhouse gas emissions from food waste into increased carbon in the soil; reducing food waste, and thus, total consumption, would allow these non-food emissions to never be spent in the first place.

There is one extra action we need to be taking to reduce food waste in line with the 1.5c challenge; after all, food consumtion isn't limited to the home. A 2016 RMIT study into food waste within restaurants, cafes and other food service businesses found that 40% of food they purchased ended up in the bin. So I'm also going to challenge myself to buy less takeaway food unless I know the business has good food waste practices in place.

So, the conclusion after reviewing the science is: in developed nations like Australia, the US and Europe, personal actions in the home to reduce food waste will definitely be necessary to keep ourselves under 1.5c of warming. Plan your meals, and don't be afraid to buy ugly food - you can make equally good stock or soups out of a bendy carrot or a skinny celery. There are limits; personal actions won't be able tackle some of big parts of the puzzle avoiding food waste - that wasted within food retail or on the farm, or avoiding producing food that isn't needed in the first place. In a society which is geared towards the generation of profit, choosing not to produce something profitable might sound crazy, but it is undoubtably what we need to do.

There are systemic actions, as well as individual ones, that will address these issues. For food waste within the hospitality industry, stronger laws or incentives are needed to ensure industry-wide changes. Right now, only 22% of businesses even measure the amount of food they waste.

When it comes to composting while living in an apartment, I've had to go to a lot of effort to get our systems up and running; municipal composting schemes can take a lot of the hard individual work out of capturing and sequestering these emissions. In my local area, Wollongong City Council is trialling municipal collection of Food Organics and Garden Organics (FOGO) in a separate bin, to collectively prevent food waste emissions reaching the atmosphere.

There are also agricultural systems which can avoid a lot of the emissions in the first place. In our local area, Green Connect is a social enterprise which runs a permaculture farm, growing low-emissions food with minimal waste and delivering it straight to households in the local area. For people like us, where growing our own food and avoiding the whole supply chain is restricted by our available space, a local, sustainable model for urban agriculture is needed to avoid the food waste from industrial-scale agriculture.

In part three I'll finish with the first email - I promise! - and move on to the successive weeks of the campaign.