Life Without Carbon Emissions — Can You Spend A Day without Emitting Carbon?
It’s easy to feel powerless in face of the current climate crisis.
Despite significant breakthroughs at this year’s United Nations Climate Conference #Cop27Egypt, most scientists and global leaders agree with the UN Secretary that:
“Earth is in the emergency room.” (UN General Secretary, November 2022).
So, I decided to see if I could reduce my personal crbon emissions, despite dealing with the cost of living increases
Is A Net-Zero Life Possible ?
I began by examining a normal day.
1. Toothpaste
First thing in the morning, what do you do? Yes, we all breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. But putting that fact aside for a moment, you like billions of other people around the globe probably brush your teeth.
Toothpaste tubes are made of plastic and 17% aluminum sandwich tube. This makes them very expensive to recycle.
- 6 kg of Carbon is emitted for every 1kg of plastic.
This includes the cost of extracting and refining the petrol that plastic is made from.
- 11.09 kg of Carbon is emitted per 1 kg of aluminum. This includes mining, extraction, and processing, but not transport.
So, on average one tube of toothpaste = 0.18 lbs, or 3.5 Billion tonnes annually, from global use.
That’s without counting the Carbon Cost of toothpaste (36% water, abrasive agents, and fluoride) and we all know how much gets wasted at the bottom of the tube!
SOLUTION?
Some Dentists state that just wetting the toothbrush (yep, also plastic but bamboo toothbrushes are increasingly available), is just as effective.
So you could just cut out toothpaste! and get a bamboo toothbrush.
Or try the Julia Roberts way of mixing baking soda, coconut oil, and peppermint oil.
Or reduce by using less, or posting your used toothpaste tubes to a specialist recycler, rather than sending them to a landfill.
2. Bathroom Towels
I buy my cotton towels from local supermarkets usually, which means they were probably imported, (with a carbon cost)
You may be surprised to learn (I was), that
- Textiles cause 10% of carbon emissions globally.
— Dyeing causes 17% of industrial water pollution.
- Cotton uses 3% of global water.
- Cotton farming Damage = $83bn
(Sidenote: Turkey, the new global textile power horse has dedicated academic teams to work out how to clean their polluted textile wastewater, the jean dye being the most challenging. However, the engineer I spoke to didn't seem to understand the opportunity of choosing less #toxic dyes, or maybe she just didn't understand that question).
You may think organic cotton is better.
Zero use of pesticides and fertilizer, less soil erosion, and possibly less water waste, if water management is used …. but this is a grey area (excuse the pun).
Some people think organic cotton is more expensive ecologically to produce.
Solution?
Make your towels last. Yes, I am serious, throwing away perfectly good towels is not an option. In fact, I still have some towels and bedsheets, from when I was a student decades ago, which are thin, but serviceable.
Buy from an ecologically informed Fairtrade organic farm-based collective? (let's not worry about the carbon footprint of importing a towel from the other side of the world, right this minute).
So, we are not yet out of the bathroom and I feel like I may have already contributed to cutting down a rainforest.
But seriously you can see how challenging it is not to contribute to climate warming, every day.
I think I will take a break there, and continue this investigation in parts, or it will be a very long article.
Follow to read the next installment.
Parm Kaur is a writer, and project manager, hoping to start her own Net-zero plant nursery. Check it out on GoFundme
