Enviroment-friendlyness

[T'Girl]

My carbon footprint is 13 tonnes, I'm really frugal when it comes to water, my power is 75% hydro and 10% nuke, I live over a commercial kitchen so only use the heat during winter nights (gets bad in August), no AC, my clothes are form thrift stores except I buy a fairly large number of (new) shoes.

While I try to use the Metro as much as I can, I take kind of a hit on car travel I do a lot of driving doing senior meals on wheels and it racks up the miles.

Actual cheated on the carbon test, counted my cat Ghost Walker as a second person live in my apartment.

 

[Amaris]

My carbon footprint is 13 tonnes, I'm really frugal when it comes to water, my power is 75% hydro and 10% nuke, I live over a commercial kitchen so only use the heat during winter nights (gets bad in August), no AC, my clothes are form thrift stores except I buy a fairly large number of (new) shoes.

While I try to use the Metro as much as I can, I take kind of a hit on car travel I do a lot of driving doing senior meals on wheels and it racks up the miles.

Actual cheated on the carbon test, counted my cat Ghost Walker as a second person live in my apartment.

Well, to be fair, cats are sometimes more human than most humans.

 

[RJDiogenes]

I'm pretty environmentally friendly. I don't use much water or electricity. I return my returnable bottles, use the comics for wrapping paper, stuff like that. I don't drive to work, so I mostly just use the car on weekends.

 

[An Officer]

We recycle about 50% of our rubbish.
We use heating very rarely as the neighbours below blast theirs night and day, they keep as pretty warm.
The hot water is turned on only when in use.
I mostly shower, and try to keep it short.
The groceries are often carried in a comfy backpack.
We try to shop for our food every couple of days rather than a mass weekly shop which can create a lot of food wastage.
I walk everywhere and rarely use public transport.
We never leave technology on standby.
Most laundry is washed at 30 degrees centigrade, except towels, linen, etc. This has the added bonus of preserving the fabric and colour of nicer clothes.
We try not to buy too many heavy duty chemical based cleaning products, and use mainly lemon and vinegar based sprays on counter-tops and such, but there is bleach on standby when a deep clean is necessary, in the bathroom for example.

Much like the Iguana though, there is no way I am going to give up the opportunity of a nice long road-trip or a flight somewhere. Any concessions to the environment I do make, I do because it keeps me active and fit, or it keeps the bills down, or it has some other practical and immediate benefit.

I am not sure I swallow the whole global warming story hook line and sinker. I do believe we need to cut down smog, and eliminate landfills, and other such logical things, but I am not going to go to an extreme of making my life a misery trying to eliminate my "footprint" entirely by making my own clothes from old sackcloth, and cycling all the way to Scotland, and other such tedious tasks of being uber green on someone's hunch, which could very well be wrong. There is some evidence that the entire solar system is heating up, and it's probably a natural cycle that happens every so often.

 

[6079SmithW]

Forgive me for being off topic but why did you spell it "friendlyness" instead of friendliness? Nothing wrong with it I just find it strange, as with "happyness" instead of happiness.

Anyway I recycle my plastics, paper, aluminum, and cardboard because my college has a great recycling program but I guess it doesn't really count much since I'm always using my laptop and take 20 minute showers.

 

[farmkid]

We try to shop for our food every couple of days rather than a mass weekly shop which can create a lot of food wastage.

How does shopping less often create more food waste?

My wife does a big shopping trip about once a month and buys perishable stuff once a week. We waste hardly any food at all. All we do waste is due to the eating habits of children more than anything else (and the chickens eat virtually everything they don't).

 

[Tora Ziyal]

Actual cheated on the carbon test, counted my cat Ghost Walker as a second person live in my apartment.

Ah, if I count my two, my results will look better, too.

 

[An Officer]

How does shopping less often create more food waste?

Well, you are obviously more disciplined than I... you see, by midweek, I may find that the meal ingredients I had shopped for at the beginning of the week hold no interest at all, and I want to have something completely different. I then end up grocery shopping again for the ingredients to this new meal I want to have. This might be a hormonal-woman thing, sometimes I'm no different than a pregnant woman, with the cravings and the works.

This scenario can happen say, 3 or 4 times in the week. Meanwhile, while I am feeding newer cravings, the stuff I'd bought originally is going off in the fridge. The result was always lots of food in the bin at the end of the week, as it had perished before anyone had a chance to eat it, mainly because I am not very good at guessing what I'll want to have the following week.

Maybe the fluctuating British weather where I live has something to do with it... if we're having a warm few days, I may buy the ingredients to cold dishes, go home to stock my fridge, then find the weather turning arctic a couple of days later. This could lead to my salivating for a good hearty warm spaghetti bolognese rather than a chicken caesar salad, and there go my plans for the week.

Or it just might be that we buy different quantities of fresh foods, and you have less potential for things to go off. Or you might be good at packing things into neat little airtight bags and freezing them (my mum does this). I simply don't have the patience, and so will shop for meal ingredients only every couple of days, sometimes everyday. Simply to avoid wastage, or standing in the kitchen sorting, bagging, and freezing all kinds of things. And there are only two of us, so stopping by the shops to pick up only what we'll eat that day is no trouble. And we end up saving money that way, as there is nothing uneaten and then consigned to a bin. Makes for more spontaneous and fun mealtimes, too.

 

[Tora Ziyal]

We try to shop for our food every couple of days rather than a mass weekly shop which can create a lot of food wastage.

How does shopping less often create more food waste?

My wife does a big shopping trip about once a month and buys perishable stuff once a week. We waste hardly any food at all. All we do waste is due to the eating habits of children more than anything else (and the chickens eat virtually everything they don't).

I'm w/ An Officer, at least for fresh veggies. Otherwise I may lose interest in the particular food or unexpectedly eat out, and it spoils or wilts.

 

[Mary Ann]

We're pretty good as a household. Our city provides us with a big recycling bin, though we burn most of our paper (I know, I know; an open fireplace isn't very environmentally friendly but I love it too much to block it up). We also have a "brown bin" for garden waste. Kitchen waste goes in the compost bins, and we turn off lights (most with energy-saving bulbs) and do our best to unplug electrical items when they're not in use. Thanks to the UK's Warm Front scheme we qualified for a free new energy-saving combi-boiler (a gas boiler that heats water and the radiators) and had free cavity-wall insulation. I mostly cook from scratch and we have an organic veg box delivered, so we don't have as much food packaging as a lot of other households.

Where we fall short is with water usage. We live in a 1930s house with most of the original bathroom intact, so we have a toilet with a large tank, a huge cast-iron bathtub which sucks the heat out of the bath water in the winter, and no shower. We're slowly renovating the house and, once the rewiring is done, we'll look at redoing the bathroom to include a water-saving toilet, a smaller bathtub and a shower. Also, I need my car for work as I do outreach work and travel between our centres as well. However if we visit another city we tend to take the train, so that makes up for it. Also I recently bought a new car which has a smaller engine than my old car as I couldn't afford to run my old car anymore.

I'd swear I'm not a pinko-lefty hippie, but I'm sitting here waiting for the bread dough to rise, so I won't say a word.

 

[nevermore]

I do what I can. I live in an apartment, so I don't have control over my major appliances except the window AC, which is a small energy star model. I get 100% of my electricity from a wind power company to offset the old appliances. I only run my AC when it gets above 90 out (which is, unfortunately about 3 months a year) and the heat when it gets below 40 (same), and then only in one room. I recycle, buy local and organic whenever possible, use reusable bags and water bottles etc. I only drive about 20 miles a week to work and walk or take public transportation for the majority of other trips. I can't compost or anything, though, and I do travel when I can afford it.

... cloth menstrual pads.

Good god. I don't care about anything that much.

 

[TerokNor]

Forgive me for being off topic but why did you spell it "friendlyness" instead of friendliness? Nothing wrong with it I just find it strange, as with "happyness" instead of happiness.

Uhm... because it looked good and correct...though when I now look at "friendliness" it looks more correct than "friendlyness".
(Me= no English native speaker.)

You are all quite enviroment-friendly. I like that.
With the calculator I got a 12, so thats quite good, though I sometimes catch myself squandering things, which produces a guilty conscience at once.
What I also like to do is traveling (also with planes) and even I know it is not very enviroment-friendly I feel a bit like two of you already said... I don´t want to give it up.

TerokNor

 

[Holdfast]

Since my actions will have an infinitesimally small effect on the enviroment, even when multiplied across my entire life, I don't see why I should care about that effect. One person's lifestyle really is negligible. Yes, of course I'm aware of that if everyone thought like me, the total effect would be significant... but I'm not activist enough about anything to care about this sort of thing.

Instead, as with everything in my life, I apply a careful calculus to what I do. If it requires no effort, I'll do it. No point not acting, purely out of spite, in that situation. If it requires effort, I won't do it unless it saves me some money. Even if it does save me money, I weigh up whether the savings are sufficient to offset the effort. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.

In truth, the net effect of all that is that I end up being very environmentally friendly is some respects, and very environmentally unfriendly in other respects. It probably all cancels out to being average, and when I used the Nature calculator someone mentioned upthread, I come out at 28 compared to the US average of 27. So yeah, about average. It's probably a bit less given that I live in the UK, and their calculations on carbon footprint are based on US power generation data I think. Anyway, average is fair enough for me.

 

[SPCTRE]

According to a test you can take at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, my personal Carbon footprint is more than twice as large as the German average.

I suppose this is mainly due to my very, very unhealthy, meat-centric diet. Oh, and the fact that I'm not using public transport to get to work although there are several viable options for me to do so.

Otherwise, I tend to save energy every way I can. I even turn off the lights in unoccupied public rooms, for example over at the university.

And of course I sort my rubbish, I'm German. It's like second nature to us

I got about 11, but I don't know how Italian average compare to the US average.

11 point something is the German average, the global average is at about 4, so I'd say you're doing pretty well

 

[Vulcan Princess]

I've thought about these, because pads and tampons are just so wasteful, but I just don't think I could do it. I dislike pads to begin with, and then the thought of washing them is just...unpleasant. I've been thinking about the cup for a more environmentally sound alternative, do you have any experience with that?

I haven't used it, but some of my friends have, and they like it.

 

[scotpens]

... cloth menstrual pads.

Good god. I don't care about anything that much.

Eeeeww!

I'm not a woman, and I don't play one on television, but I'd never go back 100 years in menstrual protection technology just to be environmentally friendly. There is such a thing as progress, you know.

 

[STR]

Eh, all the power here is nuclear-based, which means those atoms are going to split regardless of what the load is. So any electricity savings I do is just to lower my own bill. My cheapness seems to make my electrical bill 10% lower than average, but I'm not going to take credit for being environmentally conscious. I really am just cheap.

Oh, and LOL @ literally being on a rag.

Eeeeww!

I've seen worse. I had a nasty surprise one time when my then-GF didn't realize it was her time of the month.

Fill in the blanks there and then man the #### up. I'd think a guy with both "crimson" and "executioner" would be able to handle a little blood.

 

[TerokNor]

When I take a German test I get a 6 (though a different one then the Munic one as I couldn´t find that one on the page). Hmm, but some things I had to guess... and I wonder why I have so different results taking the american and the german test.
Well anyway, but that I do not use a car (and puplic transportation only when the way is too long or the weather too bad for walking or biking) and eat no meat are probably the main factors to have a small co2 footprint in my case.

TerokNor

 

[Roger Wilco]

^^
Might be a different metric, the numbers on your test and the nature.org one could mean totally different things.

 

[scotpens]

. . . I had a nasty surprise one time when my then-GF didn't realize it was her time of the month.

Fill in the blanks there and then man the #### up. I'd think a guy with both “crimson” and “executioner” would be able to handle a little blood.

That's my Halloween username. I can only handle seeing blood during the month of October!