Facing the truth?

atmosphear added an entry about make a smaller ecological footprint:

Did the test myself as well.

Category: Global hectares

Food: 1.1
Mobility: 2.4
Shelter: 0.9
Goods/services: 2.9
Total footprint: 7.3

In comparison, the average ecological footprint in your country is 8.4 global hectares per person.

Worldwide, there exist 1.8 biologically productive global hectares per person.

If everyone lived like you, we would need 4.1 planets.

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This test is unfortunately vague at best and leaves e.g. recycling completely out. I recycle the following:

  1. paper
  2. cardboard
  3. cartons (e.g. milk and juices)
  4. metals
  5. glass
  6. drinking containers (in Finland we have a very efficient system for recycling cans and bottles)

Unfortunately recycling energy material (e.g. PE and PP plastics) would already start taking too much of space in this small house that I have been drawing the line there.

Still, vague or not it gives an idea of where to start changing if there’s need for change. I could quite easily cut off most of the dairy products (I’m having them mainly organically grown), but would it be better to replace them with soy (imported from far-away places, like Brazil) or something else? I don’t think so.

Of the goods and services section I pay attention to the material of the packages and even wrote to local companies that they could easily do better. Still a majority of foods comes packaged (e.g. lentils and beans) but they don’t need to be flown throughout the world – they are dry products that can be shipped.

Ah well… I just have to start paying even more attention to traveling and the goods section. There’s just no acceptable logic that products sold without packaging cost sometimes more than their packaged friends…

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