Consumers vs the environment
Europeans consume a lot, or perhaps one should say they waste a lot, according to figures from Greenpeace. * 5-10 percent of the electricity bill in the average household is due to appliances switched to «standby» mode. *12 percent of the average household income goes on car fuel, less than 2 percent on public transport. * A new car appears on the world’s roads every second; 4,000 cars an hour, 100,000 a day. Half of the world’s petroleum consumption goes into cars, and 20-25 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions is due to automobiles. * Waste from packaging materials in the former 15-member European Union amounts to more than 160 kilos per person a year, of which about two-thirds comes from the food industry. * In order to produce a million tons of plastic bottles, 732,000 tons of greenhouse gases are emitted. * The production of 2 ton of paper requires two to three times that weight in wood. * The planet’s forest cover has been reduced by half over the past 8,000 years because of the increased demand for paper and wood, but also the expansion of human activities. Between 1980 and 1995, at least 2 million square kilometers of forest were destroyed, equal to an area larger than Mexico. * World meat consumption is expected to rise by 2 percent annually in coming years; 43 percent of beef and over half of all pork and poultry is produced on industrialized farms. The increased demand for meat is leading to the cutting down of forests for pasture or soya monoculture for animal fodder.
