Use Less: Live Well

People could use less and live well.


 

The average person in the UK weighs 70kg but the average car weighs 1400kg. When we drive the car – on average with one and a half people in it – we’re using more than 90% of the energy to move the car not the person.  We could use less and live well.  When we get home, we turn on the boiler to heat the house up.  But mainly we’re heating the walls, windows and roof, which kindly share our heat with the neighbours.  The best homes in Sweden use one tenth of the energy of the average homes in the UK and have higher internal temperatures.  We could use less and live well. We eat meat once or twice per day on average. UK meat consumption keeps rising, giving us around 160g of protein, where a healthy diet requires just 100g.  We could eat less meat and live well.  The company that made our 1400kg car, actually bought 2800kg of material in order to make it, and we’ll replace it after no more than 14 years. They could make it with just 500kg of material, and design it so that we keep it for at least twice as long, and value it more the longer it lasts. We could use less and live well.