The environmental impact of a Sunday

My partner, Lucas, was set an assignment last week to track his impact for a day. I thought this was a fun idea, so I borrowed his essay for the Hoot. 

As I am a volunteer with the OU Environmental and Sustainability Working Group, I brought up his essay in a meeting and we discussed the importance of recognising the positive impacts each person can have in a day – no matter how small they may seem. I think that this is an important idea as sustainability issues can become overwhelming at times, dragging your thoughts to the mountain of negatives and “not good enoughs”. I find myself feeling this way often, not being able to accept any good I am doing because there is still so much I see lacking in my daily actions. The assignment, however, laid out the goods and the bads for me (as I shared much of Lucas’ day) and I saw how positives snuck in and piled up in ways I hadn’t been aware of before. The silly little clothes drying rack I kept in the cupboard suddenly took on a role of great importance and my weekly fixation and preoccupation with getting the rubbish disposal just right seemed validated – and mostly not weird. 

I hope that this little essay and article help you to reflect on the impacts of your day. That they show you the ways that you are making a difference and the ways that small changes to habits and actions can have a big influence overall.

Assignment 2: Daily Impact

It’s Sunday morning. After waking up, the first thing I do is take a shower. I try to make it as short as possible, between 4-8 minutes to save water, and generally, I try to use warm water instead of hot to save energy. After breakfast I do some schoolwork, using my computer on low-power mode, although it does have some energy-intensive components which tend to draw more power than the average computer. For lunch, my housemates and I cook using our toaster oven rather than the full-size oven, which also saves energy as our toaster oven consumes 1200W and our full-size consumes roughly 3000W.In the afternoon, we drive for 20 minutes out to Christie Lake Conservation Area, but also drop someone to do some errands along the way, which reduces our environmental impact slightly by carpooling. We play disc golf for a few hours there, which has some positive and negative effects on the environment. While it contributes to protecting the natural environment through member fees, we occasionally must trample through some sheltered growth areas to search for lost discs. While this is part of the sport, I can’t help feeling like I’m wrecking smaller ecosystems and putting little critters in danger of being squashed. On the way back home, we pass by a Value Village. We purchase some second-hand clothes and donate some of our unneeded items from the house there. This has a positive effect of reducing the amount of clothing and fast-fashion items that end up in landfills every year. After returning home, I play video games for a couple hours, which in the long term can have a significant environmental impact through energy usage. My gaming computer charger runs at 180W, which is a significant amount of energy, compared to many laptops which can run at around 45-60W of power. I don’t spend very long gaming, however, and generally only play for 1-3 hours each week if at all.       

In the evening, I prepare pancakes for dinner. Cooking at home is generally much better for the environment than eating takeout and it can reduce several different wastes. We eat a vegetarian dinner which reduces resource consumption. We have also recently made bulk purchases of most of our ingredients which contribute to less packaging being used in general. We run a load of laundry, but we hang-dry it to reduce our energy consumption significantly, as dryers are extremely wasteful in their energy consumption. It was also garbage day! We separated our recycling and organic waste, and our non-recyclable waste was thrown away. For our house of 8 people, we still manage to use less than one full garbage bag each week which is a big achievement for us and took some work. While Ontario’s recycling diversion rate isn’t great compared to a lot of first-world countries, it is still better than not recycling at all. It does, although, lull one into a false sense of consuming safely, which is just what plastics companies had in mind when they began promoting recycling in the ’80s [1]. I ended off the night by going through my closet, finding some clothes that no longer fit and offering them to a housemate who I thought the items would suit. He liked them and so the items were reused instead of being thrown out.

– Lucas Ho-Foster

[1] L. Sullivan, “Plastic wars: Industry spent millions selling recycling – to sell more plastic,” NPR, https://www.npr.org/2020/03/31/822597631/plastic-wars-three-takeaways-from-the-fight-over-the-future-of-plastics  (accessed Sep. 25, 2023).