We all know that carbon emissions are causing global warming, that water supplies are limited and that we should be protecting the rainforest. We’ve all been told to ‘turn off our lights’ and to ‘have shorter showers’ a thousand times. But few of us really understand the way we are impacting on the environment. Does buying organic cotton really make a difference? Is it more important to walk to work than to grow your own food? Is it indeed better to grow your own food or to buy it from the local shops?
The fact that the environmental costs of a product are not only not factored into its price but often are not recorded in any way shape or form perhaps represents the greatest market failing of all time. Without this information we are all lulled into a fall sense of comfort entirely oblivious of the 36 kg of CO2 required to produce our kg of beef (the equivalent of driving the average car for 140 km) or the 6,500 liters of water required to produce a t-shirt (the equivalent of having a 4 minute shower everyday for 108 days). Know your impacts is a campaign aimed at discovering and sharing this information.