Careful consuming key to smaller eco-footprints

Feature

Although it’s common knowledge that we are consuming the planet’s natural resources at a completely unsustainable rate, many people still fail to connect this looming problem with their personal consumption.

The embodied environmental impact in the items we buy every day is usually much greater than the electricity we use in our homes and the fuel we use in our cars, due to the water, cleared land and energy required to produce material ‘things’ such as food, clothes and appliances.

So rewarding yourself with a coffee after walking to work could be a zero-sum game for your environmental footprint. While the water savings of a shorter shower could easily be negated by the milk you pour on your breakfast cereal.

The Australian Conservation Foundation has published an interactive website that maps the impacts of consumer spending across the country, identifying trends and allowing users to compare the impacts of household spending in their area.

Based on research from the University of Sydney, the Consumption Atlas shows that high income, inner-city households have by far the largest environmental footprints when the underlying impacts of consumption are considered.

So what can we do about it? No one is suggesting we forgo our morning coffees or skip breakfast, but the ACF does provide key ways to modify consumer behaviour to dramatically reduce our environmental footprints:

• Cut unnecessary consumption and waste (as a nation, we spend over $10 billion every year on things we don’t use).
• Consider a healthy diet containing less meat and dairy, which require intensive land and water use to produce.
• Avoid anything imported, highly processed or over-packaged.
• Reuse, recycle, repair and buy durable items to start with.
• Consider materials carefully when building or renovating.

Product labelling to help consumers evaluate the environmental impact of a purchase has been successful in Germany. In Australia, voluntary label schemes such as Green Spot and Environmental Choice have had limited success. Last year, Sustainability Victoria pledged to reinvestigate the viability of a national labelling scheme to encourage more sustainable production and consumption.

The complexity involved in assessing the water use or carbon emissions embodied in individual products by the time they reach store shelves means consumers wanting to minimise their environmental footprints will have to do their own research and exercise their best judgement, at least for the time being. That means being aware of how production, transport and product lifecycles impact on the environment.

posted by seamas on November 15, 2008 at 12:54 pm · filed under