Does gender make a difference in terms of environmental burden?

If you are tired of arguing the same old issues at home you can add environment on the list next to money, sex and how to raise children. Check out the facts first to secure your back.

Helsingin Sanomat published a story in their monthly supplement about personal environmental burden in terms of carbon footprint. One of the issues raised was that men have larger footprints compared to women. Taking into account almost 30 000 answers from men and 25 000 from women on a short questionnaire it seems that among all age groups women’s average per capita carbon emissions are a couple of thousand kilograms smaller compared to men.

What about other evidence? A Swedish study about energy use showed that in a sample of Swedish people single men use more energy than single women. The difference was 20 per cent. The greatest difference was in the transport sector, men drive more than women whereas women spend more on clothing and healthcare for instance. Men have in general higher level of expenditure and this affects the result. However, energy consumption per unit of money spend was also higher in case of men compared to women.

Another study by The Environment Advisory Council of the Swedish Ministry of the Environment about ecological footprints and gender equality among the rich and the poor in global perspective and came to the conclusion that on average men’s ecological footprint is larger than women’s. However, in poor areas it is not a question of luxury consumption like cosmetics and car driving. It is about access to basic resources like energy for cooking and lightning, access to clean water and transportation services. As a result of lack of access on the basic resources the footprint is very small and the footprint of women even smaller than men’s.Imagine the debate this issue raised at home, in the office and online discussion forums! “If women spend money on clothes and cosmetics how about the usefulness of the spending if compared to cars and technical gadgets?” The next person continues:”The tech-toys are usually just for men but women spend money on things that benefit the whole family”. The following comment was quite common: “My girlfriend spends hours in hot shower and bath, she must consumes more than me!” Actually the last point might be true. According to the study by Vattenfall (1991, Energihushållning genom nya energivanor. Demonstrationsförsök i 350 småhus i Sverige) Stockholm women spend more time showering than men. Also a life cycle wide assessment of lifestyle was suggested just like in case of any product. The reason for this was that women live longer than men.

Can we actually learn anything about all this? I’d say yes. In general, men are more interested about the technical solutions but women are ready to make practical changes in their everyday life to improve sustainability. This means that we need to provide different options for making improvements in personal life. For sure we need both, technical development and behavior change.

Pioneering blogposts about One Did It

We gathered here some of the first blog posts about One Did It and ecological backpack and wanted to pick them up to our blog. Most of them are in Finnish, but we are looking forward to see more international posts about us.

There are few peoples that have measured their ecological backpack and encouraged others to do the same. We would like to mention few of the pioneers here: Hendrik M describes himself as an European writing about environmentalism and other stuff.

Active blogger Larko took the challenge in his blog from Janne Saarikko who is the Editor of Design Finland – Finnish Design web publication, a well-known blogger in Finnish leading financial media Kauppalehti, a writing contributor to the leading Finnish financial media community Piksu.net, and active player in international social media marketing environment.

Niko Nyman is using our badge to show all how big his eco-backpack is.

“Herttaista” is a blog by 24 years old woman who writes about everyday life with ecological tone of voice in Finnish. Fun to read, lots of comments from blog readers, nice pictures! One Did It was included in a post about the grocery bags.

Noora Shingler is an environment coordinator and journalist who is interested in health and environment. She writes about food, fashion, environmental issues and events. People can read her texts in IMAGE and YLE Olotila in Finnish. She participated in the One Did It press conference which was held in Brussels in May 2008.

Finnish graphic designer reveals her other side in her blog, she likes to do paper crafts and cards and she derives her inspiration from the nature.

Latvian blog writers think they are ecological hippos; we should do something to the UI of the test result page to make users to understand they can change the equivalent item (excavator, T-rex, hippo, T-Ford, penguin and matchbox) that is displayed in the eco-backpack. We also learned that our blog badge is not good with special characters.

A few of advertising and digital media agencies have mentioned One Did it in their blogs, we would like to thank King and Viidakorumpu for noticing us.

We'll be happy to see more posts and challenges through blogs, One Did It registered users can copy the code of their ecological backpack badge and share it in their blog. We hope to spot some new blog entries and we’ll be writing about them in a while.

Here is some of One Did It team's backpack badges, how heavy is your backpack?

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.

It is not easy being a responsible consumer, or is it?

Last weekend I had a peaceful morning with the thick Sunday issue of Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest newspaper in Finland. I learned about what Finnish people are willing, and not willing, to do in their personal life to stop climate change. However, what made me write a post today was an interesting story about comparison of tomatoes. What should the environmentally and socially conscious consumer choose?

Growing tomatoes in the Finnish greenhouses during the winter season requires loads of energy and produces lots of greenhouse gases too. This is shocking news for many Finns who have used to believe that local products are always the most eco-friendly and responsible option. According to the article, if you want to be climate friendly, you should choose tomatoes produced in temperate climate like Spain. It is more energy efficient to transport the tomatoes to Finland by sea or road than to heat the greenhouses in Finland. However, questions have been raised about the working conditions of seasonal workers in many countries in Central and Southern Europe. You can find the article in Finnish here.

No doubt that we are confused in front of these questions. I think this is a good story explaining that responsible consumption is a multidimensional issue. What I would have expected in addition to comparison of fresh tomatoes is a wider point of view on the issue. If you happen to live in the cold North do you actually need fresh tomatoes year round? I don’t know if from the social point of view dried or canned tomato products are better than fresh but from climate and energy efficiency point of view it would have been nice to hear if during the winter you should favour these products instead of fresh tomatoes.

If you’d like to favour local products, seasonality is the key word. Unless you happen to live in Southern Europe this means that tomatoes and fresh veggies are enjoyed during the summer and root vegetables, apples, preserved veggies, fruits and berries chosen during the cold season.

My point is that we need to move beyond the comparisons within one product category and look at the big picture. Now that fresh tomatoes are available year round, it does not mean that the only responsible option is to choose the best tomato. Maybe it is better to choose veggies from another product category. This is what One Did It encourages you to do, think beyond mere product comparisons and question your habits a bit.

From intention to action

While writing this post I’m enjoying a smooth ride on the German railways from Wuppertal to Berlin. This has been my fifth visit to the city of Wuppertal and today has been the sunniest day I’ve ever seen there. I hardly could leave the city since everything looked so different on a sunny day. They say that Wuppertal is the rainiest city in Germany and I have no reason to doubt that.

What brought me to Germany are two conferences touching the topic of sustainable consumption and production. The first one was organised by the CSCP (The UNEP Wuppertal/Institute Collaboration Centre on Sustainable Consumption and Production). For me the most inspiring message of the conference was that there are many examples like the transition towns movement showing examples on how individual people and small communities can make changes in their everyday lives without any orders from above. A slight frustration was occasionally in the air when we were discussing about pace of the change in policy making. But the positive thing is that we don’t need to wait for that. Mr. Chris Church from ANPED (The Northern Alliance for Sustainability) put it so nicely: “We already have tools and approaches to deal with climate change.” The important thing is that we need to act now. Sometimes we claim that “they” (referring to business, governments, transnational organisations, other people etc.) are not doing anything for sustainability. The participants of the conference seemed to believe – in parallel with One Did It team – that we need a positive approach and open minds to reconsider our own habits. Start with you, your family, local community and the change has already begun.

I was also reminded about the importance of networking and changing ideas. The organisers provided a market place for project ideas in the field of sustainable consumption and production. Inspiring discussions arouse while people were exploring each other’s ideas and finding potential partners for their projects. The discussions continue in the dedicated online network.

My hope really is that as lively discussion will arise between the members of the One Did It community and our team to help to develop the One Did It site even better. Another thing I wish is that the One Did It site will be the platform where ideas and inspiration to start action is found. Let’s show the world that we are not waiting orders from above. We have the knowledge and motivation to start to change our behavior today.

P.S. In Wuppertal also the FIN-MIPS Household report was released. In case you are interested to learn more about ecological backpacks of households, please download your copy here.