Consumption - Week 5, Household Covenant

The household covenant asks this key questions concerning consumption: "What ways can you go further in reducing your consumption and changing your patterns to conform to sustainable patterns?"



Some ideas are: checking you're not addicted to anything (coffee, books, shoes?); an audit of goods produced under fair-trade, anti-sweatshop or locally produced conditions; setting a target for foods sourced locally or produced organically or; learning about local food sources.



A suggested resource is the Sustainable Living Consumer Guide.



For us, this will require a bit of work. We don't have a fancy lifestyle, so we don't tend to think of ourselves as big consumers. We'll have to think very carefully about what we do consume and the related issues.

I'd like to know if spending on second-hand books has any negative ramifications. We tend to get tinned tomatoes from Italy (they're pretty cheap): is this better or worse than Australian tinned tomatoes? Is there an alternative to tinned? Does the preservation in steel cans actually help to reduce waste? Does the extra weight of the steel (during transport) outweigh the benefits longer-life?

And it's tiny things too. Is it better to buy pre-chopped sundried tomatoes than chop them up ourselves? I'd assume that a factory can chop them up in huge amounts and that would save energy consumption somewhere - but is that better than using my muscle energy at home?

I think the way to go is to write down a long list of things that we buy, then try to find out the things that have significant negative (or positive) impacts.