Reasons to shop less
Forget about taking shorter showers or turning off lights. The real environmental problem stems from the things you buy.
THE world’s workshop – China – surpassed the United States as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in 2007. But if you consider that nearly all of the products that China produces, from iPhones to T- shirts, are exported to the rest of the world, the picture looks very different.
“If you look at China’s per capita consumption- based ( environmental) footprint, it is small,” says Diana Ivanova, a PhD candidate at Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Industrial Ecology Programme. “They produce a lot of products but they export them. It’s different if you put the responsibility for those impacts on the consumer, as opposed to the producer.”
That’s exactly what Ivanova and her colleagues did when they looked at the environmental impact from a consumer perspective in 43 different countries and five rest- of- theworld regions. Their analysis, recently published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, showed that consumers are responsible for more than 60% of the globe’s greenhouse gas emissions, and up to 80% of the world’s water use.
“We all like to put the blame on someone else, the government, or businesses,” Ivanova says. “But between 6O% and 80% of the impacts on the planet come from household consumption. If we change our consumption habits, this would have a drastic effect on our environmental footprint as well.”
The analysis allowed Ivanova and her colleagues to see that consumers are directly responsible for 20% of all carbon impacts, which result from when people drive their cars and heat their homes. But even more surprising is that four- fifths of the impacts that can be attributed to consumers are not direct impacts, like the fuel we burn when we drive our cars, but are what are called secondary impacts, or the environmental effects from actually producing the goods and products that we buy.
A good example of this, Ivanova says, is water use. You might think about using your dishwasher very efficiently, or taking shorter showers, will save water. But when researchers looked deeper, they found that much of the water used on the planet is gulped up by producing the things that you buy.
Consider beef. Producing beef requires lots of water because cows eat grains that need water to grow. But because cows are relatively inefficient in converting grains into the meat that we eat, it takes on average about 15,415 litres of water to produce one kilogramme of beef.
Dairy products require similarly large amounts of water to produce. When a group of Dutch researchers looked at the difference in producing a litre of soy milk with soybeans grown in Belgium compared to producing a litre of cow’s milk, they found it took 297 litres of water to make the soy milk ( with 62% of that from actually growing the soybeans) versus a global average of 1,050 litres of water to produce a litre of cow’s milk.
Processed foods, like last night’s frozen pizza dinner, are also disproportionately high in water consumption, Ivanova said. Making processed foods requires energy, materials and water to grow the raw materials, ship them to the processor, produce the processed food items and then package the final product. This is particularly bad news when it comes to chocolate, which is one of the most water- intensive products we can buy. It takes a shocking 17,000 litres to produce a kilo of chocolate.
The researchers also looked at environmental impacts on a per- capita, country- by- country basis. While the information is sometimes surprising – Luxembourg has a per capita carbon footprint that is nearly the same as the United States – it mostly follows a predictable pattern. The richer a country is, the more its inhabitants consume. The more an individual consumes, the bigger that person’s impact on the planet.
But the differences between individual countries are extremely high, Ivanova said. “The countries with the highest consumption have about a 5.5 times higher environmental impact as the world average,” she said.
The United States is the overall worst performer, with a per capita carbon footprint of 18.6 tonnes CO2 equivalent, the unit used by researchers to express the sum of the impacts of different greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and sulphur hexafluoride.
It is followed closely by Luxembourg, with 18.5 tonnes CO2 equivalent, and Australia, with 17.7 tonnes. For comparison, China’s per capita carbon footprint is just 1.8 tonnes CO2 equivalent. Norway, at 10.3 tonnes, is three times the global average of 3.4 tonnes CO2 equivalent per capita.
The results also reflect the effects of the electricity mix, or the fuel source that countries rely on for electric power. The prevalence of nuclear or hydroelectric power in countries such as Sweden, France, Japan and Norway means that these countries have lower carbon footprints than countries with similar incomes but with more fossil fuels in their energy mix.
For this reason, Ivanova says, a significant portion of household impacts from Sweden and France come from imports ( 65% and 51% respectively), because the products that are imported are mostly produced with fossil fuels
The advantage of identifying the effects of individual consumer choices is that it pinpoints where consumers in different countries can cut back on their impacts.
Two easy ways to cut your environmental impact are to stop eating meat, and cut back on your purchases, said Ivanova. Currently, EU consumers spend 13% of their household budget on manufactured products. If the average consumer switches from purchasing things to purchasing services, this would shave 12% of the EU’s current household carbon footprint, Ivanova said.
“Any activity where we have a choice of buying a product or using a service, the service will have lesser impact,” she said. – Norwegian University of Science and Technology.