Paulien de Haes, een van mijn collega’s bij Sustainability, heeft een gastblog geschreven over haar energiegebruik in een week!

Bedankt, Paulien!

Stuff for the Week

375 kilometres, 1 cubic metre of water (direct usage), about 4 m3 of natural gas and 90 kWh of electricity. That’s the score for the week but that only contains my uses of direct and consequent indirect energy. It amounts to around 154 kilograms of CO2 equivalent for the week. Extrapolated to a year that would be a bit over 8 tonnes of CO2 equivalent. Not a lot but there’s still plenty of room to improve, especially looking at transport. I’ve actually not driven that much this week compared to others since I got a ride with my dad one day and caught the train back and worked from home one day as well. It would be much better to take the train more often but the connection from here to the office is just really bad. I know, excuses, but maybe if/when we move to Amersfoort it’d be a bit easier…

But most importantly, I’m not even counting all the other things that I’ve been using!

So what did that include? Well, I can’t even start to list the stuff I used this week, since it’s such a diverse and amazing pile of stuff. They range from dairy products to the newspaper to tofu and paper statements from the bank. And then all the appliances we have, which are used over multiple years (and could be discounted for that I guess).

Let’s highlight one of the things I use: water. There’s this water calculator you can use on the internet (see this link) and that calculates your actual water footprint. Cause like you saw we don’t use that much water. I guess we do take quite a few showers after training and all but we don’t have a dishwasher, do laundry 2-3 times a week and only water the plants when necessary. But your water usage actually entails much more than that. It’s in everything we eat, drink and use (furniture, clothes, electronics) every day. So if you multiply my direct usage with around 1000 it would be closer to the real estimate.

Tracking of what I use was more difficult than expected and calculating my real environmental impact is just not really possible. There is simply no system in place for that yet. I’m not sure if it would make people more aware of their usage if there would be but it certainly would help people like me who want to diminish their environmental impact. I mean, what is the impact of the dinner I ate (including the meat) or the coke I drank? Or the coffee we have at work? And did it make a difference me choosing tofu over fish/meat when I had a wok meal at the company restaurant? I’d like to know. And we know a lot of things just by measuring our direct impact, just like we do for the companies we work for, but there’s so much more outside of that. And I’m not even starting to discuss what I should include in my impact or not (my system boundaries), since much of what I do and use during the week is work-related. Should it be part of mine or my company’s environmental footprint?

All questions that come up when you do this sort of thing. And I guess it’s part of the struggle for everyone who wants to make a difference at an individual level. I guess all I can do is keep track of what I use and not use or do things that aren’t necessary and that I know are bad for the environment. We’ve been thinking of eating less meat and I think we should do that for sure. And getting more local produce or organic products could help to0. Then looking into our home energy use and our transport use. Well, there could be many things…let’s just do them one by one  .

Hopefully this is of some sort of use to you too and might even inspire you to track your ‘stuff’  for a week. If you need any help or would want to compare your usage to mine (e.g. water footprint or CO2 equivalents) just drop me a line and I can enlighten you with my somewhat scientific method of measuring my environmental impact. At least it makes you aware. That’s the first step to changing the world!