Its the Little Things
Here is the next tip in our “Don’t be an Eel with Energy” challenge.
Leading on from the last post regarding your personal environmental footprint I have recently come across a few articles that try to establish the total cost of everyday objects.
The first is a quick analysis of the “true cost” of imported bottled water performed by a Sustainability Engineer and MBA Pablo Päster. The analysis calculates the total amount of water used and green house gases emitted to import bottle to the United States. Whilst the numbers won’t be the same for other geographical areas they do go to show you how much impact little things can make. From the article
The total amount of water used to produce and deliver one bottle of imported water is 6.74kg (5kg + 20g + 1kg + 720g)! And the amount of GHGs released amount to 250g (93g + 4.3g + 153g), or 0.25kg, or 0.00025 tons.
That is close to 7l of water to package and transport 1l! Here is the link to the original article - AskPablo or Treehugger for a look at some of the discussion that this generated.
The second article is a look at a smiple gold ring. This article for New Scientist looks at what it takes to extract the amount of gold required to make a ring from the worlds most productive gold mine.
In fact, it takes two tonnes of rock, blasted from the face, then hauled to the surface, ground up and treated with cyanide, to provide enough for my 10-gram ring.
And on top of that, making my ring required 5 tonnes of water, 30 tonnes of air pumped underground to keep the mine cool, enough electricity to run a large house for several days – and about 10 man-hours of labour.
Read the full article here - New Scientist Environmental Blog
These two example demostrate the impact that small things on the world around us.
Photo courtesy of flickr user evetsggod
Tags: Energy Eel