Sustainability is the responsible usage of natural resources without compromising the well-being of the environment, allowing time for the resources to naturally replenish themselves. It’s essentially what you get when you combine the Industrial Revolution with the Hippie Movement of the 1960s- it promotes development, but only after considering the environment and all the life it encompasses. The term has sprung into prominence as of late, undoubtedly a result of our increasingly unsustainable practices regarding the usage and treatment of our resources. The concept of sustainable development is often divided into three sectors- environmental, social, and economic (as can be seen in the diagram below). It is when we work towards the welfare of all these sectors, we achieve sustainability.

One’s ecological footprint is the measure of the individual impact each person has on the environment, in relation to our usage and consumption of resources. A consideration of our diet, transport, household, and daily habits, it is essentially a measure of how sustainable our lives are.  To measure my own ecological footprint, I took the online test, and received alarming results:

As one can see, I have an ecological footprint of 8.2 global hectares, a carbon footprint of 13.8, and we’d need 4.8 Earths if everyone lived like me,all of which are far from ideal. Accordingly, I have identified two aspects of my life that contribute the most to my ecological footprint, and will identify changes I could make to reduce my ecological footprint.

The first aspect is transport. My family owns two cars, one of which is a BMW X3 (big SUV) and the other being a Volkswagen Golf (small hatchback). Cars contribute to air pollution heavily and are an unsustainable means of transportation, since they burn petrol (a fossil fuel) to power the engine, which releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, amplifying the greenhouse effect, where greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide) trap radiation from the sun in our atmosphere, leading to global warming. Transportation contributes more than half of the carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide in our air, along with nearly a quarter of hydrocarbons. Air pollution doesn’t just impact the environment, it impacts us as well, causing asthma and bronchitis, and killing over 30,000 people every year. Unsurprisingly, the BMW is the less fuel efficient out of the two cars, since it requires more power to accelerate as a result of its heavier weight. Therein lies the first improvement I can make, which is always trying to use the Volkswagen whenever I go somewhere in car, since it is the more eco-friendly car out of the two. Normally, I use the school bus to go to and come back from school, but on the days I stay back after school, I often take taxi. This is another thing I could change, since using the MRT would be a much more sustainable option, due to the fact that it doesn’t produce nearly as many greenhouse gases and carries more people, reducing emissions. My house is a 15 minute walk from Woodleigh MRT station, which is a perfectly reasonable distance. This doesn’t only apply for school, and I could start using the MRT more often during the weekends as well.

The next aspect is food. I am a non-vegetarian, and I eat meat along with animal products every day. This is not sustainable, since the meat industry is one of the leading contributors to climate change. To put this into perspective, meat and dairy provide 18% of all calories and 37% of all protein, but use up 83% of all farmland and produce 60% of all agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. As described before, this enhances the greenhouse effect, resulting in global warming. The vast majority of emissions from the meat industry come specifically from the beef industry, and beef is something that I only have around once every week  as I normally tend to eat chicken or fish. However, cutting down on my beef intake is one change I could make, limiting it to once every two weeks or a month, since I honestly think it’s something I could live without (it’s a bit too chewy for my liking). However, the main area I can focus on is my food waste. More often than not, I don’t finish my lunch in school, and have to throw a good portion of it away. Around 1.3 billion tonnes (one-third of all food produced) gets wasted yearly, and consumers in developed countries waste almost as much food as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa. We’re not killing the environment here, we’re killing the population, since someone else could be eating the food that’s been wasted. To counteract this, I should push myself to completely finish all my meals, or avoid buying altogether on days I know I won’t be able to finish.

Though there are smaller changes I could make such as taking shorter showers or only flying ‘sustainable’ airlines, the one change I’d stick with is not wasting food, since it’s the one that applies to me the most. As opposed to the other choices, for which I have reasons, this is one which is unjustifiable and needs to be changed. I’ve always taken food for granted, but I now understand how absolutely nothing should, and how understanding the true value of our resources brings us one step closer to achieving sustainability.

Works Cited

https://auto.howstuffworks.com/air-pollution-from-cars.htm

http://www.fao.org/save-food/resources/keyfindings/en/

https://soapboxie.com/social-issues/The-Environmental-Economic-and-Social-Components-of-Sustainability

https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/vehicles-air-pollution-and-human-health