Low Impact

It can be hard to lower your impact on the environment if you don’t know your current environmental footprint. In an ideal world, you’d have some sort of magic website which could tell you exactly how much environmental damage your lifestyle was causing at any instant - as you made changes to your habits, the number could shift up and down. Instant feedback!

Unfortunately, environmental impact is a complex area. There are companies set up which will (for a fee!) do an environmental audit on an organisation and calculate how much greenhouse gas emissions an organisation causes through its business activities. But for a humble individual, this can be overkill.

Here then are 4 simple rule-of-thumb ways to measure your environmental impact. They’re not rocket science. They’re not hard to measure. They are, admittedly, generalisations with plenty of exceptions and special cases but for an average household they give a simple way to see how much your habit changes are reducing your impact on the environment.

Your Power/Gas Bill (or Usage)

Next time you get a power bill, rather than just blindly paying the amount requested, take note of the amount. And if the bill records it, note your actual power consumption. You want to bring this number down over time.

This one is pretty straightforward - power is typically generated from coal or gas-fired power plants that emit copious amounts of greenhouse gases. One hint - a typical household may well find that their power bill varies greatly from quarter to quarter - perhaps you live in a cold climate and the electric heater gets a workout in winter, or perhaps you live in a hot climate and need the airconditioner on full-blast in summer. To get a good idea on whether your consumption is increasing or decreasing, try to compare your consumption against the same period in previous years.

Alternatively, you can subscribe to green energy to get your retailer to provide electricity sourced from renewable sources. Your bills won’t go down, but your greenhouse emissions will!

The same goes for your gas bill - the gas supplied to your house is burnt to provide heat for your stove or central heating, and in the process releases greenhouse gases. So, reduce your gas consumption and you directly reduce your greenhouse gas emissions.

Your Car Odometer (or petrol bill)

Every litre of petrol you burn results in 2.2 kg of CO2 going into the atmosphere. If you can reduce the miles you travel month-to-month, you can have a big impact on the amount of carbon dioxide you’re responsible for.

Try and get into the habit of recording the car’s odometer at the start and end of each month to see how many kilometres you travelled… then try and score lower next month!

The really keen amongst you can keep track of how many litres of petrol you put in their car over a particular period - this will let you keep track of whether you’re actually using less petrol, perhaps through more conservative, economical driving techniques.

Your rubbish

How many times do you take out a plastic bag full of rubbish to the bin? How heavy does the bin feel when you drag it out into the street?

Our society can waste a staggering amount, and all that rubbish tends to go into landfill. Any useful materials are lost, and incredible amounts of methane (a very potent greenhouse gas) can be released. Keep an eye on how much you are throwing out and try and reduce it. Perhaps you can buy less in the first place. Or waste less. Or recycle more.

Your consumption

For an average family, up to 2 thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions they are responsible for comes not from their direct actions but from the goods they purchase. Everything you buy has had raw materials gathered and refined, then assembled, then packaged, then transported to the shops. Each one of those stages incurs an environmental cost.

Perhaps one of the biggest ways you can reduce your impact on the environment is simply to consume less. That’s not to say you have to live a monk-like existence - although for those with monastic tendencies reading this, well done on your low-impact lifestyle! But when you’re next shopping, have a think about how much you need what it is you’re buying. Or maybe buy the item with less packaging. Or the item that hasn’t travelled as far to reach the shelf in front of you.

Measuring this can be as easy or as hard as you like, but simply looking at your credit card bill month to month will give you some idea of your consumption.

So there you go. Nothing earth-shattering there, and its not hard to point out exceptions to the guidelines above. Still, they represent some good, general ways to measure your environmental impact.

Categories: efficiency, environment, green, reduce