Surveys suggest that people think recycling will make the biggest difference to their carbon footprint. There are countless blogs explaining how to reduce our waste to practically zero. However, the truth is no matter how much effort we put into recycling, it will neve reduce our carbon footprint as much as other actions and we should put in more effort in other places. As mentioned on other articles on this blog, there are certain actions in the areas of diet, housing and transport which make a really big difference, and it worth investing effort in these areas more. This article is not saying don’t bother with recycling, because recycling properly will reduce your carbon footprint by 0.2 tonnes per person and every bit helps. But there are actions you can take which will be more important than recycling.

Things that make more difference than recycling

Changes in diet: just cutting beef from our diet is estimated to reduce carbon emissions from the average diet by 21%. This is equivalent of 0.4 tonnes a year. Making more effort to eat less dairy and more plants can reduce your carbon footprint to up to 1.1 tonnes a year. Also 22% of food we buy ends up in landfill, so there is even more room to cut our carbon emissions if we do not buy food we throw away.

Running an energy efficient home: there are actions that individually make as much difference as recycling. These include drying lining clothes, replacing light bulbs with LEDs and switching the light off when not in the room and turning down the thermostat by 1 degree. These are a few of the many tips on this blog to make your home more efficient and save money on electricity, gas and water bills. Doing these actions combined can easily reduce your carbon footprint by at least 1 ton a year. The bigger the house, the more carbon emissions and money you will save adopting these measures. If you have a big house, this is an area to focus on.

Avoiding one long-haul flight travel: a long-haul flight is defined as a flight which is more than 6 hours long. Avoiding a long-haul flight altogether saves 1.6 tonnes and choosing to go holiday closer to home by plan still reduces the carbon footprint of your holiday by a lot.