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A Consumer’s Guide to Reducing Pollution

Posted on February 13, 2023February 13, 2023 by dishanth

Consumers play a major role in creating pollution. By some estimates, household consumption is responsible for the majority of air and water pollution in the world.

But by being aware of how you use water, what you toss in the trash, how you drive and how you use energy around the home, you can take some simple steps to prevent a lot of pollution.

While you may think of pollution as a global problem, reducing pollution from your household can have more immediate benefits by improving your neighborhood’s environmental health.

How to Prevent Air Pollution

A 2015 study in the Journal of Industrial Ecology found consumers account for 60 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

“If we change our consumption habits, this would have a drastic effect on our environmental footprint as well,” Diana Ivanova, one of the study’s authors, told Science Daily at the time.

Pollution prevention is often a matter of consumer choices. Products that are similar can have much different effects on the environment. The way you use products from your car to lawn care chemicals can significantly affect how much you contribute to air pollution.

The Car You Drive

In 2017, highway vehicles emitted 18.9 million tons of carbon monoxide, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Such emissions play a role in the creation of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and ozone, that warm the atmosphere. And breathing in higher levels of carbon monoxide decreases the amount of oxygen that reaches a person’s organs and tissues. For a person with heart disease, the health effects can mean a trip to the emergency room or a hospital stay.

Motor vehicles also produce hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxide and particulate matter that also contribute to air pollution.

But the way you drive and the vehicle you choose can cut back on not only emissions but also how much money you spend on gas.

Let’s say you travel 15,000 miles per year and the average cost of gas is $2.83 per gallon. You can save about $700 per year if you drive a car that gets 30 miles per gallon instead of one that gets 20 miles per gallon.

And you can potentially improve gas mileage by about 10 percent if you ditch aggressive driving habits that waste gas, such as speeding, accelerating rapidly and braking.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Driving more efficiently or driving less can reduce the amount of air pollution you put in the air. Scheduling your multiple home deliveries so they arrive on the same day can reduce pollution from delivery trucks. And keeping your car in tune and its tires properly inflated will improve your gas mileage while reducing the pollution it puts out.

Household Products

Consumer products from kitchen cleaners to shampoos now account for as much air pollution in urban areas as all forms of transportation, according to a 2018 study in the journal Science.

Air pollution from cars, trucks and other types of transportation has been declining as the United States and other countries have passed stricter emission standards. But there hasn’t been the same kind of regulation of air pollution from household products like kitchen cleaners and personal care products.

These products contain volatile organic compounds, also called VOCs. Once these compounds escape into the atmosphere, they can create ozone or other air pollution.

When you burn fuel in your car, only about one one-thousandth of the VOCs in your gas or diesel ends up in the air. But products like cleaners, paints, hair spray and perfumes can pump a larger percentage of their chemical pollutants into the air as they evaporate. And these chemicals can also contribute to indoor air pollution in your home.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Look for “Low VOC” in products’ labels and make sure containers are tightly sealed to reduce evaporation. Buy products with the EPA’s “Safer Choice” label. These are products that work as well as conventional products but are safer for human health and the environment, according to the agency. You can search for and compare products in the Safer Choice database.

Energy Use

Your household energy use may create twice as much greenhouse gas emissions as your car does in a year’s time. More than 63 percent of the electricity in the United States still comes from burning fossil fuels, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Improving energy efficiency in your home can help reduce air pollution.

The typical household spends $2,000 a year on electricity. Using Energy Star products can save you 30 percent or about $575. At the same time, you’ll avoid putting an extra 5,500 pounds of greenhouse gases into the air.

WHAT ELSE YOU CAN DO: Something as simple as turning off the lights when you leave a room can make a huge difference. A 2014 study in the International Journal of Science and Research estimated excessive use of light wastes 2 million barrels of oil every day.

Lawn Care

Motors on lawn and garden equipment are not as clean as the engine in your car. They may be small, but they can pump a lot more pollution into the air. And simply pouring gasoline into their tanks before you crank them up can cause air pollution, too

Gasoline spills may seem small, but there can be millions every day. Spills contribute to smog and other kinds of air pollution.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Using electric lawn mowers or using portable gas cans with automatic sealing and shut off features are two quick ways to make your lawn care greener.

Preventing Water Pollution

Polluted runoff and storm water is considered one of the greatest threats to clean water in the United States. In urban and suburban neighborhoods, storm water and melted snow can’t easily soak into the ground. The water runs into storm drains, taking oil, dirt, chemicals and lawn fertilizer directly into streams, lakes and rivers.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Simple steps around the home make big a difference in reducing water pollution. Pick up pet waste, keep yard clippings out of storm drains and fix car leaks before the next big rain washes oil and other fluids into your local water supply.

Pesticide and Fertilizer Alternatives to Prevent Water Pollution

Using alternatives to toxic pesticides can reduce water pollution. Pesticides include consumer products like Roundup or other weed killers as well as insecticides. But there are natural alternatives.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Plant native flowers, shrubs and trees that are resistant to pests and can attract pollinators and other beneficial insects. Install bird and bat houses in your yard to combat pesky bugs. A 2018 study in The Science of Nature estimated that globally, birds eat nearly a half trillion tons of insects a year.

Take a similar approach with fertilizers. Nutrients such as nitrates and phosphates in fertilizer can overstimulate water plants and algae. Phosphorus has been called “junk food for algae.” It fuels algae growth, which kills fish and other life in waterways.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Hire a certified lawn care professional or carefully follow label directions. Too much fertilizer can damage plants and pollute groundwater. Leave grass clippings on the ground after you mow to create a free, slow-release fertilizer. The Peace Corps also offers instructions for making your own less-toxic pesticide alternatives from natural ingredients.

Reducing Landfill Waste

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated Americans threw away more than 260 million tons of solid waste in 2015. That came to 4.48 pounds of trash per person every day of the year. More than half of the waste ended up in landfills.

More than 91 million tons of solid waste were recycled and composted in 2015. Another 33 million tons were burned to generate energy.

Paper, food and yard trimmings accounted for more than 54 percent of all solid waste in American cities. In many cases, all three could have been either recycled or composted.

Landfills also contribute to air pollution. Organic material buried in landfills creates landfill gas as it decomposes. The gas is about half carbon dioxide and half methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere.

Landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States. They produced about 14 percent of methane emissions in 2016.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Compost organic waste such as food scraps and grass clippings to keep waste out of landfills and help your lawn or garden grow. Don’t just recycle paper, glass and cans; buy products made with recycled materials. And opt for reusable products from cloth mops to rechargeable batteries instead of disposables.

25 Things You Can Do to Reduce Pollution

Everyday activities can contribute to air, water or land pollution and you may not even realize it at the time. Here are some things you can do to reduce pollution in the air, water and landfills.

Source – ConsumerNotice.org

Do ‘environmentally responsible’ products help the planet? Or do they just get us to buy more stuff?

Posted on November 2, 2019November 15, 2019 by dishanth

Abbey Dufoe, a 28-year-old web producer in New Jersey, cares about the environment. On the weekends, she and her partner go on beach hikes and pick up trash. She buys in bulk to reduce packaging waste and tries to recycle as much as she can.

She is also a fan of “green” products like metal straws, tote bags and reusable water bottles, and buys her clothes and shoes from companies that claim to make environmentally and socially conscious products. And, as much as she can, Dufoe tries not to use disposable items in order to reduce her contribution to our planet’s burgeoning plastic waste problem.

“It’s basically just about lowering my footprint,” Dufoe says, “because I know I have to buy this stuff anyway.”

Or does she? One of the big criticisms facing the practice of conscious consumerism — purchasing environmentally and socially responsible products — is whether, in the name of sustainability, we sometimes end up buying even more stuff. Take Dufoe’s reusable straw. She says it’s easy to keep clean and to remember to carry with her. However, she admits, she also has a couple of other reusable straws at home.

“We are putting more materials out into the world,” says Emma Rose Cohen, CEO and founder of Final Straw, a company that sells the colorful, foldable metal straw Dufoe carries with her. “There is the irony of buying something to reduce consumption.” Plus, she adds, thanks to the proliferation of cheap knockoffs of her product, “inadvertently, we actually created a tonne of additional waste because of these knock-offs. It wasn’t our direct waste, but still.”

Indeed, the idea of being more environmentally friendly by producing more stuff feels counterintuitive to some. “The notion of shopping for salvation turns my stomach,” Richard Heede, director of the Climate Accountability Institute, wrote in an email. “We cannot exorcise the climate demon by buying more stuff.”

Cohen, however, sees the role of the consumer as an important one. “There needs to be shared responsibility,” she says. “As consumers we do have way more power than we think.”

Dufoe is familiar with the dilemma. It can be hard to draw the line between simply taking the purchases she would have made anyway and choosing sustainable options and using sustainability as an excuse to purchase more things. As an ambassador for several ethical clothing brands, she gets discount codes in exchange for posting social media photos of herself wearing their products or participating in activities such as trash cleanups.

“The temptation is there to buy something,” she admits. “The good news is, I already have everything from these brands.”

Disposable vs. renewable

In addition to reusable straws, another popular choice when it comes to green products is the reusable tote bag, used in lieu of piling one’s groceries into yet another flimsy plastic or paper shopping bag. I have a drawer full of them, some that I bought, and some that I got for free from conferences, magazines and events. They feel like a guilt-free purchase. Sure, I tell myself, you’re buying a new bag, but you’re going to use it in the place of who knows how many disposable plastic bags that would have ended up in a landfill or the ocean.

However, a study from the Danish Environmental Protection Agency looked at the environmental impacts of different types of shopping bags and found that it takes a lot more resources to make a tote bag than a polyethylene one.

One cotton tote bag, for example, would need to be used more than 7,000 times just to meet the environmental performance of a disposable plastic bag. However, this calculation does not include the environmental impact of the bags’ disposal — meaning that all those plastic bags that are potentially kept out of the oceans because of using a reusable tote aren’t factored in.

“The decisions are just really complicated,” says Matthew Wilkins, a biologist at Vanderbilt University who wrote an article for Scientific American on plastic pollution and has been on podcasts like 99 per cent Invisible to discuss the problem of plastics and recycling. “Because maybe one thing uses less plastic, but it’s more water intensive.”

The notion of shopping for salvation turns my stomach. We cannot exorcise the climate demon by buying more stuff.

Richard Heede, director, Climate Accountability Institute

Good for the environment?

So are green products a good thing for the environment? It’s hard to say. There’s an argument to be made that at the very least, they raise awareness and give people who want to make a difference a good place to begin.

“If you can start with something really easy and start somewhere where behavior changes are not very difficult, then you can convince people that larger challenges can be as easily tackled,” Cohen says.

Nik Sawe, a neuroscientist specialising in environmental decision-making at Stanford University, says that purchasing products that claim to be environmentally friendly allows people to participate in environmentalism without causing themselves too much discomfort.

Considering how to act ethically in an environmental context requires people to confront the gravity and scale of the problem — which can feel overwhelming and, according to Sawe, actually cause them not to act. A more positive experience, on the other hand, is more likely to spur action.

“If you have guilt, you’ll get self-conscious,” Sawe says. “But if you feel like a third party is doing these things that are damaging the environment, it’s a lot easier to mobilise and get pissed about it.”

In this case, the third party is the restaurant giving you a plastic straw or the supermarket double-bagging your gallon of milk. By buying a reusable straw or carrying a tote bag, consumers can feel like they’re making a difference.

However, recent research from the University of Arizona says that it might be more complicated than that. According to the study, buying less actually makes people happier, whereas buying green products did not make consumers feel better.

“Reduced consumption has effects on increased well-being and decreased psychological distress,” said lead author Sabrina Helm in a release about the study, “but we don’t see that with green consumption.”

It’s also possible that by doing something small, you’ll feel as though you’ve done something for the environment and not pursue further action.

“Everybody has a limited bandwidth for fighting the status quo,” says Wilkins. “If this is how they’re using it, then it’s misplaced.”

Not only that, but a recent study by University of California, San Diego, neuroeconomist Uma Karmarkar and New York University associate professor of marketing Bryan Bollinger looking at consumption habits among people who brought reusable bags for grocery shopping found that making a moral or “good” decision in one domain appeared to give people license to make more indulgent decisions in another — for example, purchasing more than they otherwise might have.

However, Karmarkar and Bollinger also found that because a reusable bag constantly signals to a shopper that they are doing something environmentally friendly, it might lead them to buy organic produce or cage-free eggs to solidify their good standing.

Sawe also cautioned that a product that might be environmentally friendly in one way — for example, by saving energy — can convey the impression that it is environmentally friendly in other ways as well, for example by being biodegradable or recyclable. But this is not necessarily the case.

Furthermore, some think this entire discussion is moot, claiming that the impact of individual purchases pale in the face of the massive environmental challenges we face, and argue that larger and systemic changes are needed. In Heede’s words, “screw the straws, and do something serious.”

Dufoe sees the answer somewhere in between. “We can do all these things personally, but there are definitely bigger things we can tackle.” Still, she says, deciding how to make a difference remains a struggle. “It’s hard to not fell guilty.”

This story was written by Stephanie Parker and published with permission from Ensia.com

Source: https://www.eco-business.com/

Coke, Nestlé and Pepsi top plastic polluter audit again as green groups slam recyclable packaging as ‘false solution’.

Posted on November 1, 2019August 12, 2020 by dishanth

Food and beverage firms Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and PepsiCo are the world’s biggest plastic polluters, a study of litter found on beaches, streets, homes, and parks in 50 countries has revealed.

The same firms have topped the global plastic polluter audit, conducted by a collective of environmental groups running cleanup operations, for the second year in succession.

This is despite initiatives the multi-national consumer goods companies have launched to address the chronic plastic pollution problem they have contributed to.

Coca-Cola has launched recyclable bottles made entirely from renewable plant-based materials, aiming to use it in all its packaging by next year. Nestlé has a plan to make all of its packaging recyclable or reusable by 2025, while Pepsi has pledged to develop bottles made from renewable resources.

Coke uses PlantBottle packaging, which are bottles made from plants, saves the equivalent annual emissions of more than 315,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide, Coke estimates.
Image: Coca-Cola

But these measures do not address the root of the problem – the overuse of plastic by consumer goods firms – and so have not affected their standing in the global litter audit, the campaigners noted.

“Commitments by corporations like Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and PepsiCo to address the crisis unfortunately continue to rely on false solutions like replacing plastic with paper or bioplastics and relying more heavily on a broken global recycling system,” said Abigail Aguilar, plastic campaign coordinator for Greenpeace Southeast Asia, the lead group for the Break Free From Plastic campaign, in a media briefing on Wednesday.

“We call them false solutions because they perpetuate the throwaway culture that caused the plastic pollution crisis, and will do nothing to prevent these brands from being named the top polluters again in the future.”

As part of Break Free From Plastic, a global movement of non-governmental organisations advocating against new plastic production, Greenpeace orchestrated 4,384 cleanups in over 50 countries from August 1 to September 30, picking up 476,423 pieces of plastic. Almost half of the plastic waste was marked with a clear consumer brand.

Other companies identified in the study included Mondelez International, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Philip Morris International and Perfetti van Melle.

The world’s top 10 biggest plastic polluters in 2019.
Image: Break Free From Plastic.

Von Hernandez, global coordinator of Break Free from Plastic, called on corporations to reduce their production of single-use plastic, instead of using recycling or recyclable packaging as a solution.

He cited a 2017 study that found that 8.3 billion metric tonnes of plastic trash have been produced since 1950, but only 9 per cent of it has been recycled globally.

“Even if all plastic packaging were collected to be recycled, it would only be down-cycled or transformed into another inferior product that inevitably becomes waste, ending up in incinerators and landfill, polluting our oceans,” Hernandez said.

“Over the next 30 years, the amount of plastic waste is set to quadruple,” he warned.

A call for ‘alternative delivery systems’

Environmentalists urged the consumer goods companies to invest in different ways to package their products that do not create pollution.

Unilever’s hair refilling station in a mall at the Makati Central Business District in the Philippines.
Image: Unilever

Unilever, which ranked as the fifth largest polluter in the audit, launched a shampoo and conditioner refilling station in three high-traffic malls in Metro Manila, Philippines in March.

The hair and skincare giant, which owns brands such as Dove, Sunsilk, and Lux, sells many of its products in single-use plastic sachets in developing countries like the Philippines and Indonesia to make its products more affordable.

While environmentalists lauded Unilever’s intiative, they said consumers in the lower income bracket who mostly use single-use sachets will not use the refilling stations.

“It’s a step in the right direction, but malls especially in the central business district are not that accessible to the common Filipino. In our dialogue with the companies, we told them that if they are to invest and introduce an alternative [to plastics], they need to position them where they are easily accesible, like in sari-sari (retail) stores or public markets,” Aguilar said.

“Solutions must be affordable, simple, convenient, durable, and non-toxic,” he said.

Source: www.eco-business.com