Low Impact

Hmmmm. Well maybe thats just a little bit of an exaggeration. But I take my snappy headlines where I can find them!

The concept is simple. Next time you go shopping for some of your staple groceries, think about making a bulk purchase. You want some rice? Buy the 2kg bag rather than the 500g one. Need some yoghurt? Buy the big 1 litre tub rather than 6 little tubs.

(Of course, you have to make sure that you can actually use all of that quantity of the item you’re buying, especially if that item is perishable! Common sense, people!)

What are the advantages? Well, planet aside, its almost always cheaper to buy in bulk, and you don’t need to make so many little trips to the store.

But in terms of your impact on the environment, the big one is packaging. There’s a lot less plastic needed to “wrap” the 1 litre tub of yoghurt than the 6 little tubs. The same with the rice. Don’t believe me? Well, lets do a little example.

Lets pretend we have a plastic cube with each edge 1 centimetre long (it doesn’t hold much, but you get the idea!). That cube holds 1 cubic centimetre of “stuff”, and if you were to unwrap it, is made up of 6 square centimetres of plastic (each of the 6 faces of the cube is 1 square centimetre).

With me so far?

Now lets buy in bulk with a cube thats 10 centimetres long on each edge. This cube holds 10 x 10 x 10 = 1000 cubic centimetres of “stuff”. And its wrapped in 6 x 10 x 10 = 600 square centimetres of plastic.

OK. So with our first “Handy-Sized” cube, every cubic centimetre required 6 square centimetres of plastic wrapping. And with our second, every cubic centimetre required 600 / 1000 = 0.6 square centimetres of plastic. Quite the difference!

All that plastic saved is plastic that doesn’t need to be manufactured (often from petroleum by-products), and shipped and transported around. That means less waste, and less CO2 emissions.

Not only is less plastic needed per unit of “stuff”, but bigger packages are often more efficient in terms of space – the fancy shaped “Ezy-Snack” type, single-serve packaging that manufacturers are fond of, often doesn’t pack that neatly. So, those little packages need more room on the truck that ship them to the stores, which means more truck trips, more petrol consumption, more CO2 emissions. The difference may seem small, but between the lot of us, humanity goes through a lot of “stuff” collectively. A small saving can really add up.

The next key thing to look at is what “stuff” you are actually buying… but thats a whole other story!

Categories: efficiency, environment, green, reduce