Finally, it’s time for a more elaborate post about carbon footprint and a bit more general, our impact on the environment.
Why do I differentiate? Well, carbon footprint is about CO2 emissions and with that, global warming. It’s certainly a very important factor in our impact on the planet, as we hear and read (and feel) all the time. This is a factor that already has and will have an impact on current and future generations, and personally I believe that we don’t even properly understand yet what that impact will exactly be. I do think that there are many unknowns, as this evolution will bring us into uncharted territory, which makes it impossible - even for the best scientists with the best tools - to predict exactly what will happen. I also believe nature has many ways to compensate, so this is not necessarily only a pessimistic view.
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| Continued rains and floods in south Thailand for about 2 weeks, in a normally dry period. Climate change? |
But so, next to carbon footprint, there is also pollution, biodiversity, etc. Pollution in many cases also has some carbon footprint impact, but more indirect and smaller. Pollution makes life less comfortable and sometimes even impossible, and has a consequence for humans and many other living organisms. Think oil spills. Think pictures of whales, turtles, and so many other animals full of plastic. Think smog (yes, haze!). Or just the fact that you can hardly find silence anywhere.
That is why I prefer to talk about our “impact” rather than just about carbon footprint. Below, I will list a couple of things we contribute currently to reduce our impact, especially while cycling.
Carbon footprint
Let’s start with that. It’s not that easy to find a good way to calculate your carbon footprint. I’ve tried a few, and eventually used
this as I think it comes closest to reality.
WWF also has an interesting calculator, more appropriate for European countries. In any case, all were coming to a similar order of magnitude, so I’m pretty confident the numbers are at least relevant. Living our “normal” life in Kuala Lumpur, calculated in our current situation as a couple with no children living together, we would be responsible for a bit more than 26 tonnes of CO2 per year. If you divide this over the 2 of us, its close to the average in industrial nations, but almost double of the Malaysian average. Flights are a major contributor to this, and I have probably still underestimated that part.
The wake up call is: the worldwide target to combat climate change, is 2 tonnes per person!!! Even if we don’t fly anymore, it still means we need to reduce ours by a factor of more than 4!
Now, compare this to our Carbon Footprint contribution while cycling. It’s reduced to 10.4 tonnes per year - this is still an estimation for the 2 of us combined, so it means just over 5 tonnes per person per year. Still too high for the very ambitious planet’s target, but below the Malaysian average now and “only” well over double of the target…
These numbers are definitely not scientifically proven. You can have (very interesting) discussions about the parameters and why I have used this or that. Nevertheless, it does give a good impression of the difference between “normal life” and life on a bike.
Then it’s also interesting to look at the difference between using car or bicycle as a means of transport. Also for this you can find different sources, but the one I liked most comes from the European Cyclists’ Federation, ECF. Here is a
link to their report. It claims that Europe can reduce its carbon footprint by 12 to 26%, if everyone in the EU would cycle as much as the Danes! Also, the calculation in this report comes to a CF of
271g/km if traveling by car, including production and operation of the car (but still excluding aircon usage, which adds another 10–20g/km, and this would probably be even more in the tropics). For a bicycle, including production and extra calorie intake, it comes down to
21g/km! It can be a bit more or less - for instance, low meat consumption like we do makes another big difference. It means, if we compare making this trip by car vs bike, we save
229g/km between the two of us. I know, it’s a bit a weird way of thinking, but I like it because of the strong indication it gives.
Finally, if you’re wondering how we got to the statistic of “calories burned”, this is even less scientific. I’ve tried to find some online calculations of how much energy you consume when cycling, but found none that has the parameters we need; maybe
this one was the best after all. We have heavy bicycles, heavily loaded, probably about 35kg each. All take into account distance and to varying degrees the speed with which you cycle, but then what about hills (on a heavy bicycle), or high temperatures, etc. In the end, I looked at a number of calculations and made a bit of an average. It means, that for me it is about 30 kCal/km, for Ellen around 20kCal/km.
Consumption and Pollution
Another factor, as mentioned before, is pollution. Oh, there is certainly more to talk about, like deforestation - mostly taken into account in carbon footprint calculations, but then what about biodiversity? I know, but will leave that aside for now, also because these are things we can not immediately contribut to. So, pollution. In fact, it’s more about consumption and what we do with the remains of it. To be clear, consumption as such is taken into account in carbon footprint calculations. Whether you eat meat or not, whether you buy local produce, what kind of products you buy and how often, even how many devices you charge and how often, etc. So I want to focus here on how we are contributing, beyond cycling as such.
First of all, we hardly buy anything besides food and drinks. No need for any other products. That’s an easy one.
When talking about food choices, it’s almost automatically local produce, because in the areas we travel through there is usually little else - and it’s yummy too. When we are at home we do pay attention to buying local produce as well, but here it’s just obvious. Also, we do eat meat - not always easy to avoid here anyway - but in low quantities. We mostly eat in (very) local restaurants, but buy some things as well: some bread, muesli and yoghurt for breakfast, some cookies as quick energy, a chocolate bar. Unfortunately we almost always have to buy these in their plastic packaging, very difficult to avoid. We definitely try to avoid plastic bags, not always possible but we’re doing fine with that.
Then there are the drinks, mostly water. We are seldom drinking something from a bottle or can. Either we have fresh juice (without sugar please!), or we have water, tea or coffee. For all these, we either use water from a big 20l bottle (provided in many guest houses) or we filter our drinking water ourselves. Just the drinking water we need daily while cycling is easily 3 to 4L. Every evening we use our small manual water filter to prepare our bottles for the next day. No need for plastic water bottles!
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| Our simple but very effective water filter for daily water consumption. No need for bottled water. |
Finally, we have also often chosen accommodation without air conditioning. Not always, and certainly currently we do chose the comfort of air conditioning (put at 26*C) because the air is so terribly humid due to the continuous rains. Also, we don’t use any paper: no magazines, papers, books (mostly digital), …
So what are the main things we do to reduce our impact?
- Cycling, no motorised transport
- Eat and drink local produce
- Little meat, no red meat (beef is much worse than chicken or pork!)
- Minimal buying behaviour
- Water filter, seldom bottle or can drinks
- Avoiding plastic
- Almost no waste
- Paperless
- Mostly avoiding air conditioning
So, that’s a long post, and there’s still much more to talk about… Hopefully this helps to inspire you, take action, and spread the word! I’d like to end with a powerful quote I found, by Mahatma Gandhi:
“Earth has enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.”
Certainly food for thought and for good discussions!