Emissions from Stuff

Metro, a regional government agency in Portland, OR, has done us all a favor. They conducted the first ever greenhouse gas inventory of the tri-county Portland area, and the results are a bit surprising. It turns out that driving cars and heating homes aren't the region's biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. It's the "stuff" that is made, consumed, and thrown away that generates the largest GHG emissions.

According to Metro, three activities - manufacturing products and food, moving freight, and managing wastes - produce almost half the 30.0 million metric tons of greenhouse gases the tri-county area produces annually, 48 percent of Portland's total.

By comparison, natural gas consumption (largely to heat homes) accounts for 27 percent of the total, and emissions from transit, cars and light trucks accounts for 25 percent of the total.

And this is actually a conservative estimate since the report estimated emissions only for the production and transport of domestically produced items, not those that come from Mexico or places even further away, such as China. If we included the emissions from foreign made items, the carbon footprint of the "stuff" would be almost 20% more.

Now Portland is a bit unusual. On a per capita basis, Portlanders use less energy and drive less than people in most of the rest of the nation. And they get a good deal of their electricity from hydropower dams, so the emissions are nil. This makes Portland's home heating and transportation emissions lower than the national average.

But even if the emissions due to the "stuff" being bought, consumed, and thrown away were equal to those from home heating and transportation, it points out an emissions source that we have been ignoring. And it is perhaps one of the easiest to deal with. Without any numbers in front of me, I'd be willing to bet that simply reducing packaging would go a long way to reducing these emissions. And, of course, recycling - and buying the product made from the recycled material.

And I wonder if we had to account for emissions in this fashion, would the push to require "take backs," the requirement that manufacturers take back their products for disassembly and recycling, a program that is common in Europe, would gain new impetus.

There are in the end, more avenues than we might think to reduce emissions. It turns out that what is lacking is the political will.

Paul Birkeland lives in Seattle, WA, US, and develops Strategic Energy Management Systems for government, commercial, and industrial organizations through Integrated Renewable Energy.