Abstract
This chapter addresses the resource consumption and GHG emissions associated with household activities and household types. Over the course of 6 weeks 16 participating households were asked to provide data regarding their activities in the fields of housing, mobility, nutrition, waste, goods and appliances, tourism and recreation. This extensive survey enabled the authors to calculate the households Material and Carbon Footprint, representing the environmental pressure for certain household types and lifestyles. It was found that even households with similar soziodemographics differ highly in their overall impact as well as the shares attributed to the different fields especially for nutrition, housing and mobility. Two workshops were conducted where households were asked to identify possible short-, mid- and long time strategies for reducing their environmental impact (road mapping). Although not all households participated, it had become clear that many external factors prevent households from adapting their behaviour most notably in the field of mobility. However, the road mapping process also showed a high affinity of the volunteers towards lifestyle changes. Regarding the set of methods used in the study, the authors conclude that the approach is promising, but future research is necessary: amongst other potential improvements it would certainly be helpful to not only analyze the resulting environmental impact of households but also the circumstances that lead to the household’s specific social practises and routines.
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Notes
- 1.
Social practises can be defined as “a routinised type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’, and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge." (Reckwitz 2002, p. 249).
- 2.
The Carbon Footprint in this chapter corresponds to the global warming potential in 100 years (GWP100a) and is expressed in CO2 equivalents.
- 3.
The questionnaires are not appended to this book because their total length runs to several dozen pages.
- 4.
Whenever the input data was inconsistent or questionable, households were asked to verify certain inputs in the questionnaire.
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Greiff, K., Teubler, J., Baedeker, C., Liedtke, C., Rohn, H. (2017). Material and Carbon Footprint of Household Activities. In: Keyson, D., Guerra-Santin, O., Lockton, D. (eds) Living Labs. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33527-8_20
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