Get a green house

Watch your step – don’t trip over your household’s carbon footprint, writes Alex Brooks

All those planet-dooming statistics are enough to make you throw the bed covers over your head and wait for Dr Who, Greenpeace or a compost heap to come to the environment’s rescue.

Yet the guilt hanging over the bedhead can easily be assuaged with a step-by-step Tread Lightly campaign to reduce your household’s carbon footprint. (A carbon footprint might sound like something the dahliks battle but it is actually a measure of the Earth’s resources needed to support a household’s lifestyle – head to www.footprintnetwork.org to calculate yours.)

“Three areas of our life create 75 per cent of environmental damage – and they are, in order of priority: the food we eat, how we travel, the water and energy efficiency of our houses and gardens,” says Green is Good: Smart Ways to Live Well and Help the Planet author Rebecca Blackburn says,”

So go tell the whale protestors it’s actually how we run our households that can do the most good for the planet. “Everyday household activities like heating and cooling, lighting, cooking, and household rubbish account for 20 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions every year in Australia,” says Strine Design principal architect and director Ric Butt.

“Buying of food and products far outweighs the damage done by our transport and home energy use,” Neco director Jeremy Davies says. It’s easy to reduce a home’s carbon footprint buying locally produced food – the more veggies, the better - and then composting the waste to help grow more food and fix carbon into the soil to further reduce greenhouse emissions.

“We’re hearing more and more about food miles and the impact that our shopping habits can have on the environment. Buying products that haven’t been processed and shopping with the seasons in mind is healthier for both humans and the environment,” Butt says.

Blackburn goes one step further and points out that eating meat – which has higher embodied energy, water and transport emissions than veggies – is one of the easiest ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “That might not be for everyone, but they could choose one day a week to go vego or try embracing the idea of Meatless Monday,” she says.

So there you have it: if Dr Who turned into a vegetarian, the Greenpeace protestors cycled or walked and the compost heap reduced water and energy use inside the house, we’d all be able to get out of bed and face the environment each day.