Lifestyle Change #3 and Results

As part of my learning contract, I agreed with Chris to change something about my life and report on the findings from this life change. I decided to, in fact, change three things about my daily life, chosen by me, and make a blog post every week about these changes, how they impacted my environment, and the facts regarding these three changes.

This weeks lifestyle change was suggested by a co-worker. She suggested that I could change my diet for a week to cut down on the amount of ‘food miles’ my food has had to travel to get to me, and lower the carbon footprint of the food that I eat.

When we talk about carbon footprint of food, it includes all emissions produced on the farm, in the factory, on the road, in the shop, and in your home. The example retrieved from http://www.greeneatz.com/foods-carbon-footprint.html states that it takes an equivalent 63 miles ‘car miles’ to produce one kg of beef. Meat, cheese, and eggs have the highest carbon footprint, while fruit, vegetables, beans and nuts have a much lower carbon footprint. If you move towards a largely vegetarian / vegan diet for a week, I can have a large impact on my personal carbon footprint.

via http://www.greeneatz.com/foods-carbon-footprint.html

The above chart is the amount of kilograms of co2 that enters the atmosphere per kilogram of food produced. Being that my diet is high in beef, cheese, pork, chicken, eggs and potatoes, I decided to cut most of these out as much as possible, or trim these down a lot. Here are the results for the week before, and the week after:

	Before	CO2 kg	Car Miles	After	CO2 kg	Car Miles
Beef	3kg	81	189	0.25kg	6.75	15.75
Cheese	0.5kg	6.75	15.5	0kg	0	0
Pork	2kg	24.2	56	0kg	0	0
Chicken	2.5kg	17.25	40	1kg	6.9	16
Eggs	1.25kg	6	13.75	1kg	4.8	11
Potatoes	3kg	8.7	21	1kg	2.9	7
Total	12.25	143.90	335.25	3.25	21.35	49.75

As noted in my previous blog post about cutting down my co2 from ditching my car for a week, I was genuinely interested to see what a small change in my lifestyle (going to a more vegetarian / vegan diet) would do for the environment. You can see by the results above that the equivalent amount of car miles has been cut down by over 285, and the amount of equivalent co2 dropped by about 122.25. It does amaze me at the small changes I make in my life can have lasting effects.

Next week, to wrap up the blog, I will post a summary blog that recaps everything I’ve posted over these three months.