![[The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices - Practical Advice from The Union of Concerned Scientists.jpg]] ## Metadata - Author: [[Michael Brower]], [[Warren Leon]] - Source: [[The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices - Practical Advice from The Union of Concerned Scientists]] - Category: #books This book identifies the leading consumption-related environmental problems as: - Air pollution - Global warming - Habitat alteration - Water pollution ## Activity areas (with the most harmful consumer activities **are in bold**) - Transportation - **Cars and light trucks** - Personal aircraft, recreational boats, and off-road vehicles - Passenger air, intercity rail, ferry, and intercity bus travel - Other (incl. motorcycles, trailers, mass transit) - Food - **Meat and poultry** - **Fruit, vegetables, and grains** - Dairy products - Other (seafood, alcohol, soft drinks, tobacco) - Household operations - **Heating, hot water, and a/c** - **Appliances and lighting** - Furnishings (incl. furniture, metal, glass, paper, and plastic products) - Cleaning products, paints, and other chemicals - **Water, sewage**, and solid waste disposal - Housing - **Home construction** - Maintenance and repair - Mobile homes - Personal items and services - Clothing - Personal services - Paper products - Other - Medical - Yard care - Fertilizer and pesticide use - Water use - Lawn and garden equipment use - Other (incl. landscaping services and materials) - Private education - Financial and legal - Other ## Priority actions for American consumers **Transportation** - Priority actions for American consumers - Choose a place to live that reduces the need to drive - Think twice before purchasing another car - Choose a fuel-efficient, low-polluting car - Set concrete goals for reducing your travel - Wherever practical, walk, bike, or take public transit **Food** - Eat less meat - Buy certified organic produce **Household operations** - Choose your home carefully - Reduce the environmental costs of heating and hot water - Install efficient lighting and appliances - Choose an electricity supplier offering renewable energy --- ## Highlights (verbatim quotes; to be processed) - The best-selling book 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth told readers that “if every American family planted just one tree, over a billion pounds of ‘greenhouse gases’ would be removed from the atmosphere every year.” They were also asked to snip six-pack rings, use fewer plastic bags, drive less, take the flea collars off their dogs, avoid releasing helium balloons, recycle aluminum cans, and take forty-two other actions, some of which had multiple components. Suggestion number 17, for example, to “find the hidden toxics” in the American home, directly targeted shampoos, oven cleaners, air fresheners, mothballs, pens, and permanent-press clothes, but it also suggested that readers purchase a book listing hundreds of items to eliminate from the home.7 Responding to consumers’ interest in changing their behavior, other publishers rushed out comparable compendiums of commandments with 10, 50, 100, or even as many as 1001 actions readers could take to clean up the environment.8 To be sure, many of the ideas made sound environmental sense, but the detailed lists overwhelmed some people while producing guilt pangs in others unable to keep track of all the injunctions. Confusion mounted when it turned out that there wasn’t agreement among scientists about whether some of the commands, such as to use only cloth diapers, would be of any benefit to the environment. While the books asked people to plant trees, readers were left feeling that neither they nor the authors could see the forest for the trees. None of the popular guides gave a clear answer to the obvious questions: Which of all the many suggested actions would make the most difference? And should individual action be the main focus of attention? - Tags: [[sustainability]] - In the years since the Earth Summit, the term overconsumption continues to be bandied about while only rarely being examined or analyzed. Sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, those who use the term have implied that Americans need to reduce their consumption of goods and services across the board; they need to quell their materialistic lifestyle. Without further explanation or analysis, this very general decree asks Americans to accept a diminished standard of living without guaranteeing that their sacrifice will actually solve pressing environmental problems - Even when individual consumers theoretically have a better choice, they may not view it as a practical alternative. An individual who drives twenty miles to work is unlikely to switch to mass transit if the only available bus takes twice as long, comes only once an hour, and has worn, ripped, graffiti-covered seats. Homeowners are unlikely to purchase benign nonchemical forms of lawn pest control if none of the stores in their town display such products and the sales clerks do not even know how they can be ordered. In many cases, therefore, what needs to change is the choices available to consumers. The key decisions then need to be made at the corporate, institutional, or government level rather than among individuals. Americans seeking to reduce the environmental impact of products would often be best served by pressuring their local, state, or national government to adopt policies that make it easy, or even required, for manufacturers and users of products to choose the environmentally sound option. For example, the government decision to require appliance manufacturers to list the energy costs of their products not only provided consumers with useful information but gave manufacturers a reason to improve the energy efficiency of their products. Cities that set up curbside recycling programs increase citizen participation in recycling. In the case of leaded gasoline, it was obviously much more effective for the government to ban this dangerous product altogether than to wait for every manufacturer and every consumer in the country to voluntarily switch to the unleaded alternative. - Nevertheless, the role of individual Americans and their personal consumption choices remains large. Just as we vote with our ballots on election day, we vote with our dollars when we choose to buy or not to buy particular products. Not only do we send important messages to manufacturers when we buy their products, but we let our family, friends, and neighbors know something about our values. - Tags: [[favorite]] [[sustainability]] - So where do individual consumers fit into this story? Well before governments acted, consumers had taken the matter into their own hands. Back in the mid-1970s, in response to scientists’ first published articles about threats to the ozone layer, millions of Americans stopped using aerosol spray cans of deodorant and hair spray. Since about half of all fluorocarbons produced at the time went into these cosmetic products, this was not an insignificant step. A 1976 public opinion survey, just two years after publication of the first scientific reports of the CFC threat, showed that more than one-fifth of Americans had shifted from spray cans because of concern for the environment.13 By demonizing the spray can, environmentally concerned consumers made it financially appealing for cosmetic manufactures to switch their products to other containers and easier for the federal government, in 1978, to ban ozone-depleting chemicals from spray cans. The actions of individual consumers were central to solving what, at the time, was half of the problem. - Tags: [[sustainability]] [[individual action]] - We can see that individual consumer action works best when it does not require significant consumer sacrifice. As Lydia Dotto and Harold Schiff’s book on the ozone controversy observes, “Giving up spray cans was a change in life-style that was not particularly hard to live with; it had the perhaps unique advantage of being a virtually painless exercise in environmental responsibility.”14 Unfortunately, there are few such painless exercises. - Unfortunately, the CFC story also reveals the difficulty of trying to solve environmental problems solely through voluntary consumer action. After the demise of the CFC-filled spray can and the polystyrene cup, still other consumer uses of CFCs remained, but most people were reluctant to do anything about them. About 140 million cars and trucks on the road in the early 1990s had CFC-carrying air conditioners that were prone to leaks. As much as half of the CFCs could escape before the car owner noticed a loss of performance. On top of that, car repair shops servicing the systems generally did not worry if the rest of the CFCs escaped into the atmosphere. Although some consumers tried to find service shops that recycled the CFCs, few considered giving up their car air conditioners - Tags: [[sustainability]] [[ia]] - Most often Americans do not fully understand the dangers associated with particular products, but sometimes they also remain unaware of developments enhancing product safety. Seventeen years after CFCs were eliminated from spray deodorants and hair sprays, many people still think those products destroy the ozone layer. Similarly, a significant share of the environmentally concerned public is unaware that foam cups are no longer responsible for ozone destruction. - Much of the confusion stems from the difficulty in getting accurate information about problems with consumer goods out to people who are being bombarded by a much larger number of messages encouraging them to buy and cherish particular products. The average American is exposed to about three thousand advertising messages a day, and globally corporations spend over $620 billion each year to make their products seem desirable and to get us to buy them.15 No wonder it can be hard for people to focus their attention on the environmental dangers of gas-guzzling cars or lawn pesticides. - Tags: [[sustainability]] - The trash saga, in fact, is symptomatic of how American consumers, in their eagerness to do the right thing, are sometimes led to focus their attention and energies on issues that have little connection to the real environmental threats we face. - In the early 1980s, however, the recycling movement seemed to come to a halt. One reason was that the focus of official policy shifted from recycling to converting trash to energy in incinerators. Much of this shift can be attributed to the attitudes of solid waste professionals, most of whom did not take recycling seriously, seeing it as complicated, inconvenient, and too dependent on voluntary household participation to make much of a dent in the waste disposal problem. High-tech incinerators capable of burning almost everything in the waste stream and producing steam and power at the same time seemed a far better solution. Wildly fluctuating prices for recycled materials also forced some early recycling programs to shut down or cut back. In the end, despite the success of numerous community-based recycling programs, the average rate of recycling in the country in the early 1980s rose no higher than about 10 percent.32 THE SUCCESS OF RECYCLING PROGRAMS The Mobro episode was one of many events that combined to rejuvenate the recycling movement in the mid-to-late 1980s. - Tags: [[sustainability]] - Indeed, much of the success of recycling programs can be attributed to the quasi-religious support they receive from ordinary consumers. In a 1990 Gallup poll, 80 to 85 percent of people said they or their households had participated in some aspect of recycling; no other identifiable environmental action even came close to this level of support - Tags: [[sustainability]] - There are more than 200,000 industrial waste dumps of various kinds in the country, most of them “surface impoundments,” which are basically natural or man-made ponds containing liquid wastes. Although officially judged to be “nonhazardous,” many of these sites contain a veritable soup of compounds that could seriously harm the environment, such as oil and gas drilling wastes, fertilizers and other agricultural chemicals, and residues from organic chemical and plastics production. - Another important factor overlooked by the critics is that the cost of recycling tends to go down as more people participate and recycle more things. - Tags: [[sustainability]] - Certainly, plenty of other consumer obsessions—many involving trash—have turned out to be a waste of time. A classic example is the brief glorification of cloth diapers. (We deal with the cloth-versus-disposable-diaper debate in chapter 6.) Such episodes demonstrate that consumers need far more solid, factual information about the choices that confront them than they usually get. The problem is not just that consumers may waste a lot of time and effort on supposedly “green” actions that do not benefit (or may even hurt) the environment. Perhaps even more important, repeated instances in which wrong or misleading information is given can turn even the most enthusiastic and committed green consumers into cynics. Like the boy who cried wolf, environmental activists who loudly trumpet dangers that later prove false or exaggerated risk turning off the very constituents they are trying to mobilize. - Americans spend their money on many different things—from apples and armchairs to zinnias and zip drives. Which of all these things cause the greatest problems for the environment, and which are relatively benign? One lesson of the Mobro saga is that American consumers need more and better information about the actual impact of their various activities on the environment - Tags: [[sustainability]] [[ia]] - we will show how just seven spending categories are responsible for most of the environmental damage attributable to consumers. - Tags: [[sustainability]] - Tags: [[sustainability]] - How did we arrive at this list? The process is described in detail in Appendix A of this book, but to summarize it briefly, we relied mainly on two comprehensive environmental studies, or risk assessments, one conducted by the EPA, the other by the California Comparative Risk Project.1 These studies collected all available scientific data on the health and ecological impacts of a wide range of human activities and ranked them according to severity (high, medium, or low). We selected only the problems that ranked as medium or high risks in either study. We then whittled the list down further by excluding problems not linked to current household consumption or activities. That meant dropping, in particular, pollution from inactive hazardous waste sites and mines, as well as from chemicals such as PCBs that have already been banned or whose use is greatly curtailed. It also meant excluding stratospheric ozone depletion, since most of the chemicals that damage the ozone layer are being phased out under international treaties and are no longer sold in the United States. Of course, we do not mean to imply that these problems are insignificant, but decisions made by consumers from this day forward will do little either to alleviate or exacerbate them. - Tags: [[sustainability]] - After determining the environmental problems to focus on, we created a set of environmental indexes so we could quantify the contribution of various activities to each problem area. The indexes included the number of tons of greenhouse gases, common and toxic air pollutants, and common and toxic water pollutants emitted each year. To represent sources of habitat alteration, we created indexes of consumptive water use (in gallons per day) and of “ecologically significant” land use (in acres, adjusted to take into account the relationship between different types of land use and species endangerment patterns). Then we set about investigating how the environmental impacts are linked to household purchases and activities. We created a model of the U.S. economy that traces environmental impacts from all kinds of industrial and agricultural activity down through the production chain to individual consumer products and services. We added the direct effects of household activity, such as air pollution produced by home furnaces. We then used this model to calculate the impacts of household spending in 134 categories, including items as diverse as cheese and carpets. These categories were aggregated into fifty major categories (e.g., dairy products, furnishings), and then into ten broad activity areas (e.g., food, household operations). (In Appendix A, we will explain our research method in detail and assess its strengths and limitations, but here we want to focus on our results.) We discovered that just seven out of the fifty major categories account for a majority of the environmental impacts (except toxic water pollution) linked to consumer behavior. - Tags: [[sustainability]] - THE MOST HARMFUL CONSUMER ACTIVITIES Cars and light trucks Meat and poultry Fruit, vegetables, and grains Home heating, hot water, and air conditioning Household appliances and lighting Home construction Household water and sewage - Tags: [[sustainability]] - The variation is important because it shows that how households spend their money does indeed matter. - Tags: [[sustainability]] - About a third of the automobile’s contribution to common water pollution is from runoff of salt and other chemicals applied to roads. The substantial automobile share of land use is also due to the damage caused by roads and highways to ecosystems. This is one case where the impacts are clearly not in the consumer’s direct control, so it is tempting to ignore them. We need to recognize, however, that the tremendous emphasis on automobiles in our society is behind much road construction, and that roads have a major impact on wildlife in one way or another. Including the effects of roads in our analysis helps remind us of our responsibility for how our society meets its transportation needs. - Tags: [[sustainability]] - Food production has a pervasive impact on the environment. About 60 percent of our country’s land area is devoted either to crops or to livestock grazing, often greatly diminishing its ability to support natural wildlife. Then there are the effects of fertilizers, pesticides, animal wastes, and erosion on water quality, not to mention methane emissions from rice production and ruminant livestock and air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from energy use. All of these factors combine to make food second perhaps only to transportation as a source of environmental problems. - Tags: [[sustainability]] - Growing fruit, vegetables, and grains also has a major impact on the environment, most noticeably in water use. Irrigated crop production for human consumption takes an enormous amount of water (about 30 percent of the total). Food crops in general also use substantial amounts of land and produce some water pollution, mainly because of fertilizer and pesticide use and soil erosion - Of course, short of taking themselves off city sewer systems and installing septic tanks in their backyards, there is nothing consumers can do in their personal lives to reduce this form of pollution—it is up to government to improve waste treatment. Individual citizens can, however, prod their local governments to take action - In 1991 about two-thirds of the timber harvested in the United States went to structural lumber of one kind or another, and most of that was for home construction - Tags: [[sustainability]] - Nevertheless, spending less money (whether voluntarily or not) usually results in a lower impact on the environment. - PRIORITY ACTIONS FOR AMERICAN CONSUMERS TRANSPORTATION 1. Choose a place to live that reduces the need to drive. 2. Think twice before purchasing another car. 3. Choose a fuel-efficient, low-polluting car. 4. Set concrete goals for reducing your travel. 5. Whenever practical, walk, bicycle, or take public transportation. FOOD 6. Eat less meat. 7. Buy certified organic produce. HOUSEHOLD OPERATIONS 8. Choose your home carefully. 9. Reduce the environmental costs of heating and hot water. 10. Install efficient lighting and appliances. 11. Choose an electricity supplier offering renewable energy. - Tags: [[sustainability]] - First, the mere purchase of a car harms the environment because it encourages the manufacturing of more automobiles. When you picture that new car in your driveway, imagine instead the four tons of carbon and nearly 700 pounds of ordinary pollutants pumped into the atmosphere as a result of its manufacture. - Tags: [[sustainability]] --- **Relates to**: [[sustainability]], [[individual action]]