So, the Riot for Austerity challenge is to use one tenth of what the average American uses. A pretty extreme challenge, but they're not dogmatic about it as they say:
"the goal is to reach a 90% reduction (or the best each of us can do) *AND KEEP IT THERE* after 1 year."
I don't think we'll ever get to the goal they've set, but we're doing better than 'average' in some respects. They say that the average American household uses 900 kwh of electricity per month. So far this calendar year, we've averaged about 750 kwh per month, even though we've had the central AC on for the last three months. The next couple of months are usually fairly low ones for our electric bills, so that should bring the average down. We've already replaced almost all the lightbulbs with CF ones. My next move to reduce our electricity use will be to buy another indoor drying rack and get a washing line set up to dry laundry outdoors.
Apparently "the average American generates about 4.5 lbs of garbage PER PERSON, PER DAY." I weighed our trash before going to the dump this weekend. I don't usually weigh the trash bag, but I could tell as I lifted the bag that it was a lighter than average trash week. We had 2.5 pounds of trash TOTAL for the four of us for the week. We also had 7.5 pounds of paper recycling, and about 9.5 pounds of plastic and glass recycling. (I forgot to subtract the weight of the container for the glass and plastic so it was probably a little less than 9.5 pounds.) There was some other glass and plastic that was not included because they were returnable bottles with deposits on them. Any food waste that we could put in the compost bin we did, and I didn't weigh that. I'm not sure if it counts as trash anyway, but I suspect the other recycling does because many communities still don't offer recycling opportunities. So I took less than 20 pounds of stuff to the dump/recycling center - about 16% of the 126 pounds of trash the 'average' family of four creates.
There are many areas of our lives that we could make less wasteful, but it looks as though we're off to an OK start.