The Carbon War Is Real! Here’s How To NOT Lose It

On Sunday, 19^th May 2024, Hindustan Times ran the below article that gave me quite a stir. It painted a rather stark picture of how the increasing scales of our carbon footprints resulted in the slow extinction of some of the natural resources of the country that we’ve been taking for granted all these years. Give it a read if you haven’t already:

Nolen gur, ker-sangri, Sattriya dance: Climate change is taking a toll on elements of culture

While we have been reeling under the effects of weather change, and limiting its effects via air-conditioning, cabbing, and heating, there is a significant change happening in India, which strikes at the roots of our art and culture. As ecosystems come under stress and evolve, our existing ways of living are undergoing changes. From the spice hills of Kerala and the coffee plantations of Tamil Nadu to the sheep and goats living in the Himalayas, change is visiting us all. While people may learn to adapt (often means to change livelihood, move to cities, emigrate), our plants and animals aren’t adapting. As a result, people depending on traditional art and craft, agriculture, and sheep and goat rearing are finding it hard to eke out a sustainable livelihood.

As someone who is climate-conscious, I have been reading and writing about things we can do to manage our personal carbon footprint.

What Is A Carbon Footprint?

Well, it means all the things we do that consume precious resources. Some of our activities are involuntary: we need to breathe, we need to find ways to cool down or keep ourselves heated, and we need to eat and sleep sustainably. Some of our activities aren’t involuntary, well not so much: we don’t need to shop as much as we do; we don’t need to live 24/7 in 16-degree air conditioning; we do not need to live 24/7 inside our social media profiles continuously loading content on clouds; we don’t need to live in a glass house (it looks stylish because we borrowed from the west where insulation was a key ask due to heating requirements. Does India really need insulated housing?

Our footprint is a sum of the environmental impact of all these activities. From the 2l of water spent when flushing our toilets to the CO2/NO2/SO2 emissions that happen when we drive or take cabs or fly somewhere, not to mention the cost of the petrol that is being burnt.

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article on tips and tricks we can implement on a daily basis to reduce our footprint. Here are those simple ways to do your bit!

If you are still with me, below are some additional suggestions we can implement. Would it show impact immediately, maybe not. But believe me, you are making a difference by consuming less. Another thing that you are doing is reducing the wastage of resources. 

If you are someone who cares, these strategies will help you with your own understanding of climate change and your ability to make an impact. If you are like me, someone who has developed climate anxiety, who worries and frets that we aren’t doing enough, these will help you feel better about some of the less salubrious choices we are forced to make.

Reduce Your Online Footprint

Before you click on your next photo, stop and think for a moment. There could be other ways to reduce your digital footprint. Most of us have exhausted the 15 GB Google allocated to us when it started Gmail/ Google Photos/ Google Drive and whatnot. Now we have expanded our Google drives to 100 GB on average, followed that up with One Drive as well as Apple Cloud (and I am just talking of simple people, not nerds). All of our continuous clicking, shooting, and recording are stored on the cloud and are available at the click of a button. Who pays for it? The environment, that’s who.

Next time, why not look at the shots and videos you have taken and remove the duplicates before they upload to your drive? This way, you save your phone battery, and your drive space, and bonus, also reduce your impact on the environment!

Delete / Archive Emails From Your Inboxes

My first email ID was Yahoo Mail. I followed that up with Gmail back when Gmail first arrived (via invitation only!). Quickly Gmail became default for almost everything. I have emails that go back 16/18 years. While I am glad for all the memories, do I really need them all now? That too on the cloud?Probably not.

So I have been systematically copying personal emails from those days onto a notepad and deleting emails. It is a long process, but it reduces the energy Google servers need to manage my online data. Bonus; your personal data is safer too.

I also make it a point to delete every non-relevant mail from my email account keeping only critical updates.

Active spam filters also help to reduce the load your mail carries, not to mention keeping important mail showing in your inbox.

I am sure there are loads of tips and tricks available online for better management of your inboxes and you may be following them. The only thing that I will add is when you have less content, you can find it quicker and you are more organized.

Segregate Your Waste

My community decided to implement waste segregation about a year ago. While the community effort petered out, it drove me to take action at a personal level. Today, I routinely segregate my waste into 4 different categories:

• organic waste or kitchen waste: depending on the person managing the kitchen, this goes either to my compost or to my plant pots directly
• paper waste: all paper (new packaging labels, amazon wrappers, cartons, liquid medicine cartons, old visiting cards and newspaper inserts, community announcements, bills, and everything else that could be made of paper goes to the paper recycling
• light plastics: all food wrapping, cling film variety plastic and other soft plastics such as polythene bags, milk and curd pouches go into dry waste basket
• batteries, hard plastics, glass, wires, spectacles and their cases, broken plastic planters, plastic food delivery cartons: all are recyclable by your paper recycler (kabadiwala). I collect everything and every couple of months I recycle them

I am struggling with some kinds of waste at the moment mostly old rotting wood-based waste, construction and repair waste but I am hopeful that there will be a way to manage them too.

Water Recycling

As part of my studies in ESG and carbon footprint, one recurring theme is how we as consumers don’t pay accurately for the resources we consume. If the true price was charged, then not only would producers be a lot more conscious, but consumers wouldn’t use and throw away 80% of the things we consume. Take for example water. Every drop of water is practically single-use. Ever thought of that? You drink water and that is removed from the body via sweat or urine. You take water from the tap, wash clothes, dishes, and floor and throw the water. Your air conditioner pulls humidity from the air and you simply let it go down the drain. Every drop of water is single-use. And almost every one of those drops is clean fresh water. I know what you are thinking, water is endlessly recyclable. Sure, it is. But what about Earth’s capacity to recycle? The water cycle is taught from class 4 onwards: 3 simple words evaporation, condensation, rainfall. The cycle may follow physics but rains were dependent on geography and geology. Now we have damaged our ecosystem to a point where physics matters but geography won’t. Long story short, the same amount of water will be recycled but it will not be in the rivers you depend on, or the area you live in, or at the time when the water needs to fall for your crops to be sown and food to be grown.

So What Can You Do To Reduce Your Dependence On Supply Water?

• if you are an RO user, collect the draining water and use it for mopping floors, washing utensils, running air coolers or even water plants
• add a drain pipe to your AC to collect the condensation. This is sterilised clean water suitable for planting and any other activity
• implement grey water recycling practices: next time you redo your bathrooms and kitchen, ask your plumber or contractor to connect your basin or sinks and shower area drains to your commode tank. This will reduce significant wastage of clean water for commode purposes and reuse existing water
• rainwater harvesting: if you live in an independent house, build a rainwater collection tank. Else badger your community to build one. Your children will thank you for the supply of clean water.

As consumers, often we think we do not have options, or that our actions are too small. However, the truth is that people are looking for role models. If I implement it, someone is watching. That someone implements, someone else is watching. That is how we build a virtuous cycle. Let’s build it.