Lou
Forum Legend
Such a good point.
I went and signed to the Conservation just to add that info to the comments.
What can I do for the environment?
- Thread starter Hog
- Start date
I went and signed to the Conservation just to add that info to the comments.
majorbloodnok
Forum Senior
Since this thread has been recently brought up again, there are a couple of points I’d like to make to link back in with the original poster’s question.
Firstly, diet. It is not necessarily true that one’s diet is the biggest change one can make to one’s environmental footprint. Changing from an average diet to a vegan one can reduce your carbon emissions by about 1 tonne per year, but about 60% of that saving is just from cutting out beef (and that’s beef reared the normal US way). Worrying about the impact of rice vs other grains and cereals is going to make very little difference. Nonetheless, changing one’s diet is probably the most cost effective change one can make personally, so I’m not arguing against the change.
Secondly, probably the biggest personal consumption of energy is through domestic heating, hot water and cooking. Anything you can do to insulate your house better and to reduce the heating requirement will make a big difference. To put this into context, making insulation and heating changes to my house brought its carbon consumption down by about 4 tonnes per year. The fact we generate electricity from solar panels and export back to the grid now makes us a carbon sink.
Nonetheless, making changes to your house is more expensive and needs investment. As a result, look at what reasonable changes you can make easily now rather than try to make the biggest changes immediately. Several small gains at regular intervals will almost certainly beat trying for perfection later.
Firstly, diet. It is not necessarily true that one’s diet is the biggest change one can make to one’s environmental footprint. Changing from an average diet to a vegan one can reduce your carbon emissions by about 1 tonne per year, but about 60% of that saving is just from cutting out beef (and that’s beef reared the normal US way). Worrying about the impact of rice vs other grains and cereals is going to make very little difference. Nonetheless, changing one’s diet is probably the most cost effective change one can make personally, so I’m not arguing against the change.
Secondly, probably the biggest personal consumption of energy is through domestic heating, hot water and cooking. Anything you can do to insulate your house better and to reduce the heating requirement will make a big difference. To put this into context, making insulation and heating changes to my house brought its carbon consumption down by about 4 tonnes per year. The fact we generate electricity from solar panels and export back to the grid now makes us a carbon sink.
Nonetheless, making changes to your house is more expensive and needs investment. As a result, look at what reasonable changes you can make easily now rather than try to make the biggest changes immediately. Several small gains at regular intervals will almost certainly beat trying for perfection later.
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500channelsurfer
Forum Legend
Today on Real Time with Bill Maher, Bill Maher outlined the environmental catastrophe that is online shopping habits that Covid etc. has only much worsened:
Increased packaging, increased delivery carbon emissions as items delivered to your home instead of just a retailer, increase in items consumed as items not seen or tried in stores are more often returned or multiple sizes and types purchased, increase in wasted items as items that do not fit or live up to expectations are often sent to landfill even when returned to vendor due to liability issues and decreased resale value, decrease in quality leading to shorter product lifespan due to encouragement of cheaper-produced items typically produced in far-away and further-to-deliver locations with lower environmental standards, etc.
Throughout human civilization, markets have been logically the best place to purchase and exchange items. The modern interpretation is the shopping mall. While far from perfect, shopping at the mall was an economy with a much smaller carbon and energy footprint than the shop online and get delivered economy.
Increased packaging, increased delivery carbon emissions as items delivered to your home instead of just a retailer, increase in items consumed as items not seen or tried in stores are more often returned or multiple sizes and types purchased, increase in wasted items as items that do not fit or live up to expectations are often sent to landfill even when returned to vendor due to liability issues and decreased resale value, decrease in quality leading to shorter product lifespan due to encouragement of cheaper-produced items typically produced in far-away and further-to-deliver locations with lower environmental standards, etc.
Throughout human civilization, markets have been logically the best place to purchase and exchange items. The modern interpretation is the shopping mall. While far from perfect, shopping at the mall was an economy with a much smaller carbon and energy footprint than the shop online and get delivered economy.
Jamie in Chile
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I think you're referring to this:
I don´t think it´s really true that online shopping is worse for the environment. The emissions from the van coming direct to your house are not necessarily worse than the emissions of your car driving to the mall. The mall has the advantage that you buy 3-10 items per trip rather than 1 yes, but the delivery van also drives around with several things in the van that it´s delivery to other people in your neighbourhood, so it´s similar or maybe only slightly worse.
Packaging yes worse for online deliveries, but I don´t think packaging is so serious next to other environmental effects.
Going to the mall supports the future construction of more malls, with the large environmental footprint of the mall´s concrete, other materials, landscaping, construction, lighting, heating and so on. Whereas online shopping only supports warehouse construction, which has a lower overall footprint as products will be stacked more efficiently and higher and lighting, cooling and heating will likely be used more sensibly since workers are not respected as much as consumers (at least not in the US).
When you´re at the mall you´re more likely to add a coffee, a lunch, or a cinema visit with additional emissions vs staying at home and ordering online where these activities don´t occur. (In the case of the lunch, the additional emissions is in the construction of the restaurant and running of that business, rather than the cooking of the food itself, which happens either way whether you go out or stay at home.)
What will cause more emissions is earning and spending more money. Whether you spend it online or at the mall will make minimal difference.
What we need is less fossil fuels and less meat and to only buy the things we need plus a few luxuries really, really want. But not be materialistic and just buy something when we have spare money or are bored or see our neighbours have bought something.
A debate about online vs mall is a debate about how best to use fossil fuels, what we need is a society without them.
I don´t think it´s really true that online shopping is worse for the environment. The emissions from the van coming direct to your house are not necessarily worse than the emissions of your car driving to the mall. The mall has the advantage that you buy 3-10 items per trip rather than 1 yes, but the delivery van also drives around with several things in the van that it´s delivery to other people in your neighbourhood, so it´s similar or maybe only slightly worse.
Packaging yes worse for online deliveries, but I don´t think packaging is so serious next to other environmental effects.
Going to the mall supports the future construction of more malls, with the large environmental footprint of the mall´s concrete, other materials, landscaping, construction, lighting, heating and so on. Whereas online shopping only supports warehouse construction, which has a lower overall footprint as products will be stacked more efficiently and higher and lighting, cooling and heating will likely be used more sensibly since workers are not respected as much as consumers (at least not in the US).
When you´re at the mall you´re more likely to add a coffee, a lunch, or a cinema visit with additional emissions vs staying at home and ordering online where these activities don´t occur. (In the case of the lunch, the additional emissions is in the construction of the restaurant and running of that business, rather than the cooking of the food itself, which happens either way whether you go out or stay at home.)
What will cause more emissions is earning and spending more money. Whether you spend it online or at the mall will make minimal difference.
What we need is less fossil fuels and less meat and to only buy the things we need plus a few luxuries really, really want. But not be materialistic and just buy something when we have spare money or are bored or see our neighbours have bought something.
A debate about online vs mall is a debate about how best to use fossil fuels, what we need is a society without them.
500channelsurfer
Forum Legend
Thank you Jamie in Chile for posting the video. We have touched on a lot of issues here, and of course we all ideally hope to have a carbon neutral civilization.
The last mile problem is the specific issue of how the consumer should receive goods, either by going to the store themselves or by having products delivered to door. Delivered-to-door efficiencies measured alone do not take into account the mental health and societal problems that result from advocating people travel less to reduce carbon emissions. An extreme and dystopian scenario in which governments tell everyone to stay at home to reduce carbon emissions and restrict mobility is a solution that few would ever aspire to. The delivered-to-door efficiency only works when individuals must travel beyond a certain threshold determined by vehicle efficiency, traffic congestion, and a host of other variables specific to each individual but this article provides a good example of estimates: Local food, food miles and carbon emissions: A comparison of farm shop and mass distribution approaches
The 6.7km range found by the article assumes the current supply chain model is maintained. I'm sure a lot of vegans would be on my side when I advocate re-localization of as much production as possible for added efficiencies. When economically viable, production of many goods can be done much more locally than our currently globalized economic systems are doing. Obviously it is not viable to build greenhouses in the Canadian arctic to grow banana trees, but economic viability is subjective, and not objective purely on prices as goes the main economists' argument. There are many people who would gladly pay a few cents more per item if they knew it was produced at higher quality from people closer to them who they can relate to and under fairer labour and environmental conditions, and the more people who are educated to this the more people who will be willing to spend a few more cents when shopping. A largest-scale example would the the computer chip shortage that reached the desk of the American president; the globalized supply chain has caused the possibility of not only economic but military insecurity by being overly concentrated in Taiwan.
Going back to the last mile problem, a key to it is the expectation of consumers to have an item delivered in a short period of time. Many of the big global e-commerce companies have promises of next or two day shipping for many of their items. By going to the mall, one has the expectation that if the item is not there, same-day is either a failure or will necessitate driving around and visiting and/or phoning other stores in order to fulfill same-day, or waiting much longer for a store delivery than an e-commerce giant can deliver. Consumers have become too demanding in that in order to get what they want and also get it fast, the carbon emissions add up exponentially as does the problem of road congestion, which feed off one another. See Delivery Vehicles Increasingly Choke Cities with Pollution backed by https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_the_last_mile_ecosystem.pdf
While I am not, per se, a giant fan of shopping malls, they are the current Western iteration of the traditional market place. People are not going to by and large decide to stay in their home all the time because of carbon emissions.; human beings have social needs too including having lunch with a friend during a shopping trip. If the societal scaling of economies will adjust to more sustainable supply chains and geographic considerations, then small malls go perfectly along with more sustainable and local means of production.
The last mile problem is the specific issue of how the consumer should receive goods, either by going to the store themselves or by having products delivered to door. Delivered-to-door efficiencies measured alone do not take into account the mental health and societal problems that result from advocating people travel less to reduce carbon emissions. An extreme and dystopian scenario in which governments tell everyone to stay at home to reduce carbon emissions and restrict mobility is a solution that few would ever aspire to. The delivered-to-door efficiency only works when individuals must travel beyond a certain threshold determined by vehicle efficiency, traffic congestion, and a host of other variables specific to each individual but this article provides a good example of estimates: Local food, food miles and carbon emissions: A comparison of farm shop and mass distribution approaches
The 6.7km range found by the article assumes the current supply chain model is maintained. I'm sure a lot of vegans would be on my side when I advocate re-localization of as much production as possible for added efficiencies. When economically viable, production of many goods can be done much more locally than our currently globalized economic systems are doing. Obviously it is not viable to build greenhouses in the Canadian arctic to grow banana trees, but economic viability is subjective, and not objective purely on prices as goes the main economists' argument. There are many people who would gladly pay a few cents more per item if they knew it was produced at higher quality from people closer to them who they can relate to and under fairer labour and environmental conditions, and the more people who are educated to this the more people who will be willing to spend a few more cents when shopping. A largest-scale example would the the computer chip shortage that reached the desk of the American president; the globalized supply chain has caused the possibility of not only economic but military insecurity by being overly concentrated in Taiwan.
Going back to the last mile problem, a key to it is the expectation of consumers to have an item delivered in a short period of time. Many of the big global e-commerce companies have promises of next or two day shipping for many of their items. By going to the mall, one has the expectation that if the item is not there, same-day is either a failure or will necessitate driving around and visiting and/or phoning other stores in order to fulfill same-day, or waiting much longer for a store delivery than an e-commerce giant can deliver. Consumers have become too demanding in that in order to get what they want and also get it fast, the carbon emissions add up exponentially as does the problem of road congestion, which feed off one another. See Delivery Vehicles Increasingly Choke Cities with Pollution backed by https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_the_last_mile_ecosystem.pdf
While I am not, per se, a giant fan of shopping malls, they are the current Western iteration of the traditional market place. People are not going to by and large decide to stay in their home all the time because of carbon emissions.; human beings have social needs too including having lunch with a friend during a shopping trip. If the societal scaling of economies will adjust to more sustainable supply chains and geographic considerations, then small malls go perfectly along with more sustainable and local means of production.
Jamie in Chile
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Perhaps you and Bill are right to be pro-mall when it includes social/loneliness factors as well as environmental - there is something to be said for "getting out of the house" but I think it's a shame that many people think that when they go out of the house nothing that is free (like walking in a park or forest) can be really good, or at least they don't think to do it.
Yes, that’s the main reason I go out, to quiet pretty places away from people. I don’t understand why most people seem to think that’s silly, but I’m glad because it keeps places like that quiet and pretty.
David3
Forum Legend
.I want a Blåhaj, but it's made out of plastic. I'm having a crisis.
/j
Edit: it's made out of recycled materials. So it's good? I can has?
No, it's wrong and evil. The only vegan toys are compost and ear wax.
Has anyone else ever tried millet? I can buy it near me in health-food stores sometimes and also in some 'ethnic' markets (catering to populations from India and/or middle east areas)
Shift from rice to millets, save 50 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050: Report | India News - Times of India
India News: NEW DELHI: Moving away from water-intensive crops, like rice and wheat, towards more hardy crops like millets can save the country 50 million tonnes o.
timesofindia.indiatimes.com
I enjoy it pretty often, also oats (a lot of oats) and sometimes hulled buckwheat groats or pearled barley, but I don't know anything about the environmental impact of those.
There are a variety of things I do:
1. I do try to shop local for food as much as possible. My local co-op has a pretty good selection of bulk goods, vegetables, fruits, and groceries.
2. I use the reusable produce bags as much as possible.
3. I buy my bread from a local bakery that hands me my loaf in a paper bag. When I get home I put it in a plastic bag that I saved from another product.
4. I go multiple places during one trip. I do my shopping, banking, visiting friends, gas, car wash, etc., all in one trip.
5. I don't buy a lot of stuff. I consciously think whether I need certain things. My small appliances are a blender and juicer. I can't see a need for anything more. I do buy some things on Amazon, but mostly things that are difficult to get locally. Even then, I probably don't spend more than a couple hundred dollars a year on online shopping.
The best ways we can help the planet is to not support animal agriculture, not waste food, buy energy efficient vehicles, walk or bike where possible, support public transit, and stop buying mountains of useless crap.
1. I do try to shop local for food as much as possible. My local co-op has a pretty good selection of bulk goods, vegetables, fruits, and groceries.
2. I use the reusable produce bags as much as possible.
3. I buy my bread from a local bakery that hands me my loaf in a paper bag. When I get home I put it in a plastic bag that I saved from another product.
4. I go multiple places during one trip. I do my shopping, banking, visiting friends, gas, car wash, etc., all in one trip.
5. I don't buy a lot of stuff. I consciously think whether I need certain things. My small appliances are a blender and juicer. I can't see a need for anything more. I do buy some things on Amazon, but mostly things that are difficult to get locally. Even then, I probably don't spend more than a couple hundred dollars a year on online shopping.
The best ways we can help the planet is to not support animal agriculture, not waste food, buy energy efficient vehicles, walk or bike where possible, support public transit, and stop buying mountains of useless crap.
I have saved old plastic bags. I have plastic bags that came with my vacuum cleaner and carpet cleaner. There are all sorts of plastic bags that can be reused.
I try not to buy things in plastic bags, but occasionally I can't get around the problem. I put the bag in a drawer and keep reusing it.
I will buy bread in a paper bag (so I don't bring any new plastic in the house), and transfer it to a saved plastic bag that I am reusing.
Why don't you just keep the loaf of bread in a paper bag as it's a better way to keep it fresh.
Because I am an elderly single, and take some of it out to use immediately, and freeze the rest for later.
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There are a lot of things we can do:
1. Reduce, reuse, and recycle.
2. Conserve energy by turning off lights and electronics when not in use.
3. Plant trees to help reduce air pollution.
4. Reduce water usage by taking shorter shower.
5. Use reusable shopping bags instead of plastic bags.
6. Use natural cleaning products and avoid buying products with a lot of packaging.
7. Buy locally grown food to reduce your carbon footprint.
8. Compost food scraps to reduce waste.
9. Choose to walk or bike instead of driving.
10. Educate others about the importance of protecting the environment.
1. Reduce, reuse, and recycle.
2. Conserve energy by turning off lights and electronics when not in use.
3. Plant trees to help reduce air pollution.
4. Reduce water usage by taking shorter shower.
5. Use reusable shopping bags instead of plastic bags.
6. Use natural cleaning products and avoid buying products with a lot of packaging.
7. Buy locally grown food to reduce your carbon footprint.
8. Compost food scraps to reduce waste.
9. Choose to walk or bike instead of driving.
10. Educate others about the importance of protecting the environment.
All of this brought to mind a recent blog post I read. We consider plastic because it contaminates the ecosystem and lasts a very long period, putting wildlife in danger.
Moreover, less plastic waste is generated as a result of the durability and biodegradability of the filaments and plastics used in 3D printing. Also, firms and people just starting out can use additional recyclable materials in 3D printing.
I was thinking about this a lot. found this video showing how to recycle a plastic bottle into a filament for 3d printing.
Just ordered this 3d printer 7 Best 3D Printers under $200 Reviewed in Detail (Winter 2023) to try this on my own.
Moreover, less plastic waste is generated as a result of the durability and biodegradability of the filaments and plastics used in 3D printing. Also, firms and people just starting out can use additional recyclable materials in 3D printing.
I was thinking about this a lot. found this video showing how to recycle a plastic bottle into a filament for 3d printing.
Just ordered this 3d printer 7 Best 3D Printers under $200 Reviewed in Detail (Winter 2023) to try this on my own.
David3
Forum Legend
.
The most widely-used plastic for 3D printing is PLA (polylactic acid). It is made from fermented plant starches: Polylactic acid - Wikipedia
PLA plastic is biodegradable, though it is slow to biodegrade.
