Taraloka

Kulaprabha writes: Last year, I started searching back through old invoices to get our annual consumption for electricity, gas, oil, water.  For several months, I was to be seen weighing our recycling waste  - paper, glass, tin, plastic, cartons - and estimating the volume of our non-recyclable waste. Then there’s travel. Fortunately we keep a log of mileage in our community cars so it only needed some arithmetic to work out our mileage over the year for business and personal use.  I added estimates for other personal car use, and also personal train and air travel. Eventually I had a spreadsheet with a lot of data in it. It’s really not difficult to assemble the data. It just needs a bit of perseverance. And the Carbon Trust website has a set of energy equivalent tables making it very easy to find out how many kilowatt hours  you get from a litre of oil or a kilogram of propane or a tonne of wood! After entering all this data into online carbon footprinting software which did the carbon equivalency calculations, I now have Taraloka’s CO2 footprint for 2007 and 2008. I worked it out separately for the retreat centre and for the community and then combined them to get an overall measurement.

Here are the overall 2008 results :

.

.

I had to make some assumptions and decisions in doing this. For example, I included Maitrimala’s travel over to Akashavana to get ordained but I didn’t include Saddhanandi’s travel over there to be on the team of that retreat. It seemed OK to include Maitrimala’s travel in Taraloka’s footprint. But I think Saddhanandi’s travel is part of Akashavana’s footprint, not Taraloka’s.  There is no allowance in these figures for the distance traveled by our retreatants getting here. I don’t know what mileage that amounts to but, in any case, I think it is part of their personal footprint, not Taraloka’s. These assumptions and decisions seem sensible to me, and I’ve applied them consistently over all the calculations. But no doubt there is a discussion to be had there. The 2007 figures show a total of 87 tonnes of CO2 ie 12 tonnes less than in 2008. But we had fewer retreatants that year and the averaged amount of CO2 per person comes in at 4.6 tonnes, much the same as in 2008.

Fortunately for me, Lindsay keeps very accurate attendance records and they enabled me to work out that there were 13 people in the retreat centre each day, averaged over the year. And, on average, there were 8 people in the community. From these it’s possible to work out tonnes CO2 per person. I’ve also worked out the amount of CO2 produced equivalent to one person here on a week retreat.

..

For comparison, the average CO2 produced per person in UK is 12 tonnes and energy consumption makes up 90% of that. That UK average includes everything : schools, government, infra-structure, etc etc……..

I’m fairly confident in the data I used for these calculations. I don’t suppose they’re 100% accurate but I don’t think there is anything significant missed out; or significantly over or under estimated. It seems that those of us living in the Taraloka community produce just over half the average UK personal carbon footprint. So that’s good! Community living ought to reduce the environmental impact. We live on-site so no daily commuting. And I guess we go off on holidays abroad less than most people.

These figures are for our actual 2008 consumption ie still using oil for our central heating and hot water. Next thing is to enter the quotations I have for biomass and solar thermal into the carbon footprint software……..

….. next instalment coming soon!

Trackback URI | Comments RSS