Earth Day – Some Simple Acts

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Today is Earth Day, as Google, Moleskine and other companies are reminding us of. Earth Day is an opportunity to think about how to reduce our carbon footprint and ecological impact.

Sigg recently began to sell aluminium water bottles that are made entirely from recycled aluminium. Instead of encouraging us to recycle our old bottles, they have skipped a step, and now make their bottles from recycled aluminium directly.

It takes five uses of a recycled Sigg water bottle for the carbon footprint to be offset. Amortising the cost of a bottle takes about 30 litres, so theoretically thirty days if you drink one litre per day.

Sportstracker, a sports tracking app that I have been using for a decade and a half or more tells me that I have walked 22hrs, cycled almost 8hrs, nordic walked 2hrs28 and run one hour.

It says that I have saved almost 5kg of CO2. It would be more if it counted cycling as commuting. I can’t control what is considered for that calculation.

I would love to see a shift away from car culture, to bike and walking culture. I would love to see people walk and cycle more, and for cars to behave more courteously, towards pedestrians and cyclists.

In theory people should be quiet from 22:00 onwards but unfortunately this isn’t the case. We always hear about how we should stop eating meat and driving cars but I’d like some effort to be made to stop people from being nocturnal. Specifically I would like the cost of alcohol consumption and smoking on balconies at night to be tackled. Being social at night, rather than during the day, means more energy being wasted for lighting, to prepare alcoholic beverages, to keep them cool and more. Think also, of the carbon footprint of every cigarette, from the tobacco that is smoked to the filter that needs to be disposed of, the supply chain and more.

It seems paradoxical that festival goers and other forms of altermondialistes are nocturnal, given that being nocturnal requires so much energy, and light pollution.

The La Dole Webcam shows the seriousness of the problem with light pollution at this moment in time. Review the night time images of the sky over the Léman

And Finally

Cycling and walking are fun. Moving away from automatically taking the car, would improve our quality of life. Driving, in traffic, is unpleasant. Water bottles are now made from recycled aluminium to start with, rather than after use. Coffee capsules are made from seaweed rather than plastic or aluminium. Progress is being made to help the environment, but more can be done.