5 Win-Win Ways to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
The thing I love about Elon Musk’s Tesla is that they make amazing vehicles. Well, Duh! I know this sounds patent, so let me explain.
Going for an electric car over a petrol car no longer feels like a compromise. People don’t just buy Tesla vehicles because they want to save the planet; they buy them because they look and perform great. You get an amazing car and saving the planet is just so happens to be a byproduct¹. It’s a Win-Win situation. But if you don’t want to fork out the cash for a Tesla, here are 5 easy and inexpensive Win-Win ways to reduce your carbon footprint:
1. Start using Ecosia — Ecosia is a search engine which uses the ad revenue from your searches to plant trees where they are needed most in the world. — They also have a mobile browser for Android and iOS. Relative to browsers like Chrome and Safari, Ecosia may seem a little bit lacking in the feature department. So if you still want to use your feature-packed browser, but also want to plant some trees, then I recommend doing the following:
- Continue using whatever browser you normally use on your smartphone, but set up Ecosia as your default browser in settings.
In effect, whenever you open up a URL link (in an email, message, forum…) or when you use the search bar to quickly lookup something it will open up the result in Ecosia. In this way, you are only using Ecosia in these incidental cases where its basic features would suffice. According to Ecosia:
“On average it takes 45 searches to plant a tree.”
2. Use less battery on your phone — A mere 5% to 15% of emissions related to smartphones comes from their actual use (the majority of emissions come from smartphone production), regardless small ecological improvements multiplied by millions of smartphone users worldwide can make a difference. Using less energy on your phone not only helps the planet but also allows you to get more screen-on time. Here’s how:
- If your phone has an OLED display setting a blank black image as your wallpaper will use less energy. This is because in OLED displays each pixel in the screen can be turned on and off, so the more black that you have on a screen means the fewer pixels needed to be turned on. You can also use this same tip if you have an OLED monitor.
- To the same point, turning on Dark Mode will significantly help preserve battery life in OLED devices. In this video, the iPhone with Dark Mode on had 9% more battery than the iPhone on Light Mode by the end of the test. If you don’t like having Dark Mode on all the time on your iPhone then you can use the Shortcut app’s Automations to turn Dark Mode on and off at specific times during the day. For example, it can turn off dark mode at sunrise and turn it on at sunset.
3. Watch content in Standard Definition (or even lower)— According to the UK’s Royal Society, watching videos in standard definition produces 8-times fewer emissions than watching 4K (Ultra High Definition) videos. 8-times less! On a small screen, the viewer might not even notice the difference. enough said let’s move on.
4. Walk more; drive less — Think about the places that you regularly drive to, do you really need to use your car to get there? If it’s only a few kilometres to your nearby store, why not walk there next time? We’ve been walking for thousands of years and it’s only recent decades that our sedentary lives have really ramped up. I could mention a million different benefits to us from walking and there are entire books dedicated to why we should be walking more.
5. Ditch the aerosols and go for a deodorant salt stick instead — Even though most aerosal cans nowadays don’t contain ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), they still contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) which contribute to “ground-level ozone levels, a key component of asthma-inducing smog.”
Instead of aerosols, I’ve started using a deodorant salt stick/rock and I must say that it works even better in preventing odour and it lasts much much longer than an aerosol can. I’ve used mine daily for more than a month now and since then the rock has only gotten slightly smaller.
Let me know if you have any other Win-Win ways to help the environment.
Footnote:
- Yes, I know that there are studies out there that actually show that using an electric car actually produces more emissions than a petrol car, depending on where the electricity is sourced from (like a coal powerplant, for example). But the point remains that electric vehicles provide the infrastructure for us to transition to renewable clean energy and reduce our reliance on emission producing sources.