Footprinting

Carbonfoot prints are funny things, I am not quite sure I fully understand them, and I am certainly not convinced by the accuracy of the calculations, but I guess some kind of measurement is better than nothing.

I remember in a previous employment I got tasked with collecting all the information for calculating the organisation's foot print. I was amazed that half of the stuff we used to do to be environmentally friendly, like printing on both sides of the paper, switching everything off and composting teabags, made absolutely no difference, it was simply not considered. Fortunately we still ended up looking extremely good, but that had more to do with the nature of our work (we only worked in Scotland so no flights round the World and we provided services, not goods, so no massive deliveries by articulated lorries), than to do with the measures we had taken. The experience didn't really fill me with confidence in the calculations.

My half hearted approach to carbon footprinting didn't stop me looking however, when I saw an article about a new book calculating the carbon cost of all sorts of activities. Fascinating reading although it did absolutely nothing to convince me that carbon footprinting is useful, but I still feel the urge to share the information.

Apparently one trip by plane has the same carbon foot print as 340.000 disposable carrier bags! That is a lot of bags. I wonder how many shopping trips that is the equivalent off?

The football world cup has a footprint of 2.8 million tonnes CO2, and that is not even including the power used for all those TVs tuned into the matches. I guess that makes watching football a not very green activity. (I might still sneak a match or two though)

I could spend some time texting in stead, but unsurprisingly that has a footprint attached to it as well. An average text that takes 1 minute to write and 1 minute to read means 0.014g of CO2 into the atmosphere. This obviously doesn't take into consideration people like me who are rather slow at texting, so my txts just might cause even more CO2. Of course if you are a teenager it wouldn't take you a minute to write a txt, you could do at least 4 in that time, so that might make up for it. I am secretly fascinated by teenagers and their mobile phone skills, most of them seem to do it automatically without even looking and they do it constantly - what is it they say to each other??? I know of a kid whose parents got him a contract with unlimited texting. It obviously turned out that unlimited wasn't really the correct term, there was indeed a limit and they got hit with quite a bill when their son had sent more than 4000 txts in a month! That would make a mark on your carbon footprint...

So if not watching football and not texting, maybe I should do the washing. Here was a pleasant surprise and confirmation that we made the right decision not to have a tumble drier. If you do a wash at 40 and line dry it it produces 0.7kg of CO2. If you turn the temperature down to 30 degrees the impact goes down to 0.6kg. But if you stick the same wash in a tumble drier the carbon footprint will be 2.4kg. That is quite a difference.

But before getting too pleased with myself I saw the carbon footprint of having children. Apparently the average child will cause 373 tonnes of CO2 to be emitted over the course of their life - I have 2 children, so that makes 746 tonnes. Thankfully it was estimated that a carbon conscious child will only cause 100 tonnes, so hopefully I will manage to bring my kids closer to 100 tonnes rather than 373 tonnes.

So what should I conclude from this - well my washing habits are not too bad, but the World Cup is out (can't really tell my husband that though...), I need to learn to txt faster and we are definitely not having any more children! Guess that is that sorted then...



If anybody is interested the book is called 'How Bad Are Bananas' by Mike Berners-Lee. I got this summary information from the Ecologist: