Do you know what is in your ecological backpack?

What a great spring weather we had in Helsinki during last weekend! People enjoyed the sunny days outdoors and many also decided to stop by at the Recycling Factory.


Reuse, sustainable and ethical consumption were the key topics at the Recycling Factory. The two-day event included exhibitions, seminars, workshops and a market place. We introduced our newly released Finnish version of the One Did It website.
It was so nice to hear that visitors found our website useful and that they liked the design. When we talked about the ecological backpack test, some of the visitors would have liked to include more detailed information; some found it difficult to make estimation for all the issues included in the test. The challenge is that we are actually not always aware about the details of our daily practices like how many kilometres we travel by car or bus or what is the heating system in our home. For the One Did It team the challenge is to design an application that helps each and every one of us to easily measure our ecological backpack without a special knowledge. To help us in this task feedback from all of you is extremely valuable.
I started to think why it is so challenging for us to describe the very basic features of our everyday life. We might take things so much for granted that we don’t even know from which source the heat comes. Every day we take the bus or tram but actually, do we have any idea about how many kilometres we move around. And so what, does it even make any sense to know? In my opinion, if we don’t realize how we heat our homes or how much we travel, how could we have an idea about what kind of burden on the environment our lifestyle makes?

There is this saying, what you can’t measure you can’t manage. If you’d like to make your lifestyle a little more eco-friendly, the best way is to first find out where you stand now and identify the most significant issues. We are keen to know where and how our everyday food is produced, is it good for our health and how sustainable it is from the environmental point of view. Similarly we should pay attention about the details of housing, energy use and our mobility patterns. If we do that then we are well aware of the three high impact household consumption areas: Food, mobility and housing.