First, thanks to all of you for your encouraging reactions to our experiment and our blog! Many of you already raised a few interesting suggestions and questions, which we gladly take into consideration.
We’ve made a few changes to the rules based on the reactions we received. First, we’ve decided to make the ‘sweets and snacks’ rule a bit stricter. In essence, we don’t need sweets and snacks so we shouldn’t buy or eat them. Our initial rule was to only eat home-made sweets and snacks, but with that rule we would be able to buy as many eggs and as much chocolate as we wanted to make chocolate mousse every day… On the other hand, if we have people over for dinner, we don’t want to be bad hosts and serve plain simple food only. So we changed the rules a bit. We can make sweets and deserts when we have guests (we do have to make them ourselves though). If we don’t have guests, in principle we don’t make sweets or snacks, unless we have all the ingredients in stock anyway (e.g. when we have a lot of apples, we would be able to make an apple pie if we had flour, butter and sugar as well). We’re not allowed to buy ingredients for sweets and snacks especially (unless we have guests).
A second change to the rules concerns general rule nr. 4. This rule used to say that we had to do research in order to find the cheapest option if we really needed to buy something. This was a little confusing and the rule seemed to be contradicting the third rule. The idea was, and we’ve changed the rule accordingly, to choose a product first, based on the general rule of sustainability, and then to spend some time doing research to find the cheapest place to buy it.
A couple of problems or dilemmas based on reactions we received remain:
- Cancelling our internet subscription is not an option. Karin works at home one or two days a week and does need the internet for this. Driving back and forth to work on these days would be much less sustainable than cancelling the internet subscription.
- It was suggested to stop using wifi and get wired again. We’re studying the feasibility of this in our house now.
- We started taking the adapters of our laptop out of the power socket as soon as the battery was full. However, some people have suggested that this actually is not very good for the durability of the battery. But leaving the plugs in the socket all the time doesn’t seem the best option as well. What to do?
Please share your opinions on these matters with us!
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Consumeless for a year 