89% of all Greenhouse Gases are tied to the 4 "Cs": Cows, Cars, Cooling, Crap
Cows, or livestock/agriculture/forestry is 17%. Cars, or transportation is 15%. Cooling & heating is 31%. Crap, or manufacturing is 12% of all GHGs.
Crap uses energy at four stages: raw materials, production, moving, binning
Making crap constitutes 2/3rds of those emissions split between the sourcing of raw materials and the respective crap’s production. On any given subway morning commute, it wouldn’t be a surprise to a see a New Yorker wearing something fashionable, listening to music on their smartphone, ordering something on Amazon. They might eat lunch at Sweetgreen while passing a trash with to-go containers spilling out of its narrow mouth. The clothes are 2 kwh, the smartphone is 2.5 kwh, and the packaging from Amazon and Sweetgreen will be 4 kwh (but hey, the salads are 17 dollars — worth it!).
New Yorkers spent $500 billion on stuff last year requiring 1.3 billion gallons of fuel to move it around
Moving crap can be tied to 12 kwh of energy per day. Getting stuff in and around New York City requires about 1.3 billion gallons of petroleum-based fuels. This gets us 365 million tons of stuff entering, leaving, or passing through NYC each year. Brooklyn alone sees 74,000 commercial vehicles crossing its boundaries per day. By contrast, there are 6,455 subway cars moving about daily.
Tossing crap in NYC can be tied to 11 kwh of energy through the use of trucks and boats moving through our canals. Residential trash is collected by the DSNY. They collect 12,000 tons of refuse daily using 4,000 vehicles, the majority being the Mack truck using biodiesel. But until the fleet is 100% zero-emissions, we will still have all these vehicles producing daily GHGs at an 84% clip.
We need to use less crap. But that’s not happening anytime soon. So what are we left with? Get less stuff new. And more stuff second hand from your neighbors. Funny enough, Cues helps you do exactly that.
