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from the read-this-while-having-a-nice,-hot-cup-of-tea dept.
When you hear about businesses with a high environmental impact or activities with a high carbon footprint, you are probably more likely to imagine heavy machinery, engines and oil rather than hairdressing. Yet hairdressing, both as a sector and as an individual activity, can have a massive carbon footprint.
Hairdressing uses high levels of hot water, energy and chemicals. Similarly, in our homes, heating hot water is typically the most energy intensive activity. For the cost of a ten-minute shower that uses an electric immersion heater, you could leave a typical television on for 20 hours.
So while it helps to turn lights and appliances off, the real gains in terms of reducing energy usage are in slashing our use of hot water. A quarter of UK emissions are residential and, of those, the vast majority come from running hot water. The longer it runs and the hotter it is, the more energy intensive (and costly) it is.
Mostly the hot water used carries a high carbon footprint, but the chemicals in shampoo don't help either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @04:55PM
Re: B12. Yes, it's important. Yes, you can get it from non-animal sources, including bacterial cultures and some fungi. I didn't raise the point because it's a relatively minor issue in terms of carbon footprints, which is where this started. For the brits and colonials in the audience, Marmite has plentiful B12 as well.
You state, correctly, that a blend of foods will do the job on protein completion. What you completely avoid is the question of agronomic feasibility. Large parts of the world are simply not agronomically capable of feeding their human population a complete protein, vegetarian diet. In fact some parts (UK, for example) are unlikely to be able to feed themselves above famine levels without massive imports of food or energy. Great while they could pour petrochemicals from the North Sea into their economy, not so great as it starts to run lower.
Thus we return to the question of: What is the carbon footprint of one pound of animal protein, compared with one pound of the equivalent in terms of nutrition (complete protein/balanced amino acid) sources, with allowances for the animals replacing machinery functions?
Just handwaving about rice and beans without checking which rice and which beans can be grown where with what rates of returns using which techniques and with what amounts of labour and automation, as opposed to (for example) oxen for draught and sheep for land clearing (hence the pound for pound calculation being complicated) doesn't cut the mustard.