Hi
As a consumer, I would love to know where I should concentrate my efforts. Shall I spend time and energy to minimize the amount of chemicals that I dispose with my waste, shall I focus on searching for local and organic products, shall I try to change my habits to reduce my carbon footprint, such as becoming vegetarian or learning to grow vegetables or to sow my own clothes?
In my day, with a fixed budget and limited time, it would be great to know what's my most important/urgent behaviour to tackle.
Fro instance, this morning I was having a shower and again I was looking at the organic ingredients of my shampoo, trying to figure out the impact of my hair wash. I was happy there was no petrol involved, but the ingredients seem coming from all the world, and I realised I didn't have a clue, whether I was doing the best thing I could.
In the UK there is a project called Carbon trust, but for what I know of it, it is sponsored by the business who wants a carbon label on his products. I wonder instead if there is a project, sponsored by a Government, aiming to create some type of macro-labelling for every single product-service, helping consumers to make a more informed choice.
Such project seems to me incredibly complicated, for the difficulty to collect life-cycle information across a worldwide supply chain, beside to keep the data up to date and finally, to sum them up in a some sort of environmental score. But maybe smaller projects are already on going and it would be just enough to join all of them together one day, from different countries.
What do you know about this? Are you also aware of academic studies trying to tackle the complexity of such task?
Thanks a lot for your replies
Nicoletta
I love this forum because it gives a good insight of what's happening expecially in Canada and in Australia and I hope the answer will come from one of these two countries one day.
nicoletta landi
ealingsustainable.wordpress.com
Macro-Environmental-Labelling
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Hello Nicoletta,
Here's my rule of thumb.
Spending money on something encourages it; not spending discourages it. Everything else we do is good, but the real test of whether something happens (or not) is whether we care enough to 'value' it, and in our world, 'value' means 'spend money' it seems.
So I would first look at where you spend the most money, which is typically on housing, home energy, and transportation energy.
Then look for opportunities to (wisely) spend less from an ecological point of view.
House too big? Poorly insulated? Water heater inefficient? Could water be heated by solar? Light bulbs incandescent/inefficient? Using air conditioning when fans would suffice? Etc.
Driving to and from work? Tellecommute? Public transit? Fuel efficient vehicle? Car pool? Driving for pleasure? Bike? Scooter? Etc.
The biggest changes will come from reviewing and reducing the biggest expenditures in general.
On the other hand, if there are little things you can do easily and inexpensively and if they are very 'observable' and might help change other people's behaviours, they're good too.
We can't change everything at once. Some things are resistant to change because of the investment in infrastructure that's already there. In those areas, it's a slower process.
We do what we can, that has the most effect.
Norm
Norm Ruttan
President
iWasteNot Systems
Canada
www.iwastenotsystems.com