Three Things with Surprising Carbon Footprints

There are many reasons to reduce your dependence on “stuff” and your relationship with consumer-driven media, however the saving of the planet is a pretty darn big one! In our day-to-day lives, we often don’t think about the carbon footprint of some very common things that we purchase for ourselves or others, but that doesn’t mean that those carbon footprints don’t exist. To that end, to help you get off on the right food for thinking about carbon consequences and the impact of stuff on the planet this year, here are three items with surprising carbon footprints.

According to The Guardian UK, if you only boil the water that you need and drink a black tea or coffee, the carbon footprint is twenty-one grams of CO2 emitted. That includes the water, the energy used to boil the water, the energy and resources used to grow and process the coffee or tea and the energy and resources to transport the coffee or tea. Now, factor in that most of us boil more water than we need and the picture is a little less pretty!

Again, according to The Guardian UK, if you use your cell phone for two minutes a day, over the course of a year you’ll be responsible for forty-seven kilograms of CO2 emissions. If you use your cell phone for an hour a day, that number increases to a hundred and twenty five kilograms of CO2 emissions. Dare we ask how many hours a day you spend on your cell phone?

This is most of the beer that you drink! Unless you are drinking from a local microbrew, the vast majority of us are drinking bottled or canned beer that has been transported significant distances. According to the research from The Guardian UK, that makes every bottle that you drink responsible for about nine hundred grams of CO2 emissions. After all, those “food miles” add up, not to mention that beer brewing is actually a rather energy intensive process.

And those are just three examples! Think of all of the seemingly harmless things that you do each day that contribute to the overall carbon footprint of the world. That’s why it’s so important that we begin to reduce how much “stuff” we collect and make wise decisions about what and how much of everything we use.

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