Reduce By Your Carbon Footprint by Changing Your Eating Habits

In the following few steps I will describe to you different ways that you can reduce your carbon footprint by changing how you eat. This includes what you eat, when you eat what, and where you buy what you eat.

Step 1 Overview

Before I get into the instruction of how to do this I'd like to answer any questions you may have.

First a definition, taken directly from the Wikipedia pagethe Wikipedia page, a carbon footprint is a "measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of green house gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide." Well there you have it. Basically a carbon footprint is how much your activities and purchases contribute to climate change. The goal of this instructable is to show methods that you can use to reduce your footprint.

Comments

[thearchitect]

Great stuff, concise and to the point!

Last week my wife was complaining about spring onions she got from a big supermarket here in England: spring onions from Mexico!

For God's sake, these bastards are paying few pennies to the Mexican farmer, then flying this ubiquitous vegetable from the other side of the world to England, releasing tons of CO2, and then selling it to us at the same price with last week's Spanish spring onions.

Give me a break, idiot corporations!..

K.

[Alienor]

Yes, here in Germany it's the same insanity...15grams of fresh chive, packed in cellophan, for 89cts - from India!
Apples from Chile, pears and grapes from South Africa, beef from Argentinia or Uruguay - I'm going mad about this....

I'm blessed with a large backyard but also with snails, all my planted veggies were gone in just 2 nights...I don't want to poison them because of the hedgehogs but so I must continue buying on the farmer's market....

[romanyrebel]

put some beer in a few old bottles with wide enough neck for snails to crawl in, they die very happy and is enviromentally friendly. ( not from a snails point of view i suppose lol)

[supernoeva]

On your last step you say "....of methane. A gas, that while not carbon..." Carbon isn't a gas. Most people are referring to CO2 because it contains carbon. However, methane is CH4 and contains the same amount of carbon. Maybe you can figure out what you were trying to say and correct that.

[CameronSS]

In Step 3, you mention how much greener a farmer's market is. However, you said nothing about the other advantages. For one, everything tastes better because it was picked sometime in the last week, not sometime in the last month. Also, there's a much friendlier environment; as a general rule, most people are selling goods at a market because they want to be there, not because they're making huge amounts of money. Also, you get happy little surprises, like the little old ladies who sell the best cinnamon rolls in the known universe.

[sardines454]

Thanks for the suggestion. I add a lot of what you had to say to step three, not word for word, but the general idea.

[dsman195276]

nooo i had this topic.

[sardines454]

Sorry, still publish yours anyway, it can't be exactly the same.

[killerjackalope]

Aaaah no this is part of my big green 'ible I'm making, it includes loads of this stuff but different, I'll put a link to this in it...

[sardines454]

Sorry to steal your topic. Still publish yours though because they can't be exactly the same.

[killerjackalope]

Yeah, I will add a link to yours in the food section because it's pretty good...

[sardines454]

Thanks, I in turn will also link to yours when I see it.

[killerjackalope]

Ok mine covers a variety of things it's main aim is to pick up where many environmental 'ibles miss things, some simple some just not that obvious....

[Patrik]

Looks good, but you could add a lot more, of course.

One piece of advice that would fit very well: use reusable shopping bags! The Berkeley Farmer's Market has a place where people can drop off and pick up used plastic grocery bags. I assume they recycle any extras at the end.

[killerjackalope]

I still mean to get the pile of bags toegther and try making some rope from them, if it's strong enough to do menial tasks it would actually be great, the only problem is a large number of our bags are degradeable as I work in the only shopping chain in the UK to have degradeable plastic bags, they really degrade, I'm seeing the first of it in our bag box thing now, as they still take 18 months to do so... It's wierd, they seem to just slowly stop existing no sludge no residues just holes appear... Any way back on track, plastic bags would make excellent materials for things as they happen to be immune to water and most damages of the environment making them great for rope, if woven really well marin applications srping to mind...