Can we measure & reduce our CO2 footprint in the kitchen? - Research

Can we measure & reduce our CO2 footprint in the kitchen?

projectkamp

With contributions from

timo

Updated 1yUpdated about 1 year ago

Food

In Progress

We don’t know yet of what is a truly sustainable kitchen, but we’d like to develop a vision of how this could look like and set some guidelines to follow on our way there. This vision and the guidelines should be documented in a way that is easy to communicate to the people in the Kamp and outside of it. Our search touches many areas, for example which food we buy and potentially grow, what kind of equipment we use in the kitchen, how we’d like to prepare the meals, and what we do with the waste. Many of the things we can do to reduce our environmental impact are available because we live in a community setting. There are still a lot of challenges on our way there, like finding out the actual environmental impact of different food items. In this research module we’d like to present you our progress and of course get your input on it.

More Information

2282

1

What is a sustainable kitchen for us?

timo

Created 2yCreated over 2 years agoUpdated 2yUpdated over 2 years ago

Our Vision: We want to have an established food culture that is regenerative for the land and for people. We’d like to eat a healthy and balanced diet that is produced in non-violent and non-polluting ways. The guidelines we set are: - We have a priority on seasonal, local and vegan food. - We’re able to buy food within the project budget. - We’re buying goods with the least amount of packaging possible. - We prioritize food that’s grown in a regenerative and non-exploitative way, and with a sustainable management of water. - When choosing the foods we offer, we attend to community needs and not individual needs. - We’re supporting regional projects to strengthen the local economy. - We’re choosing foods with a low carbon footprint. - We use the least amount of fossil energy possible to cook.

2

How to determine your CO2 footprint in terms of food?

timo

Created 2yCreated over 2 years agoUpdated 2yUpdated over 2 years ago

Some takeaways from our research into the food emissions are: - We tracked a total of 1183 kgs/liters of food and have environmental impact data for 94% of the volume (1112 kg/l) and 68% of the different food items (97/142) - At about 8.5% our shopping trips are a considerable part of our emissions (aka ‘The Last Mile’) - We emitted a total of 2804kgs of CO2 Equivalents (CO2Es) with the food we bought between April 1st and June 15th. If we’d stay in Kamp the whole year with the same average of people, our yearly emissions would be 789kgs of CO2Es per person. - Transport to the shops is much less of a factor than we thought. On average across all the suppliers and products from the studies, transport makes up 6% of the emissions of the food items. - Although coffee made up only 1.6% of the volume we bought, it resulted in almost 17% of the emissions we caused. Here's the spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RsssuVinqXINllM55ZR8XLgsUScuv4ettOd2siRhteQ/edit?usp=sharing

3

How to apply our guidelines to the community?

timo

Created 2yCreated over 2 years ago

After going deeper into the research of the environmental impact of the food we consume, we’re faced with the question on how to address it to the community in the Kamp. This can be a challenge because food is a sensitive topic for most people. In general, sharing the research within the Kamp and discussing the results is very valuable for bringing everyone onboard on this journey. One of the situations, where it's important to involve the whole group, is when deciding what we buy. One example is that we found out that the production of some of the food we consume is resource intensive in contrast to the rest. This is mainly coffee and cheese (which we consume once a week on oven night). Our approach will be to have alternatives to the resource intensive goods we’re having, in order to potentially decrease our consumption as a group. We buy some commercial vegan cheese, but also make our own. In terms of coffee we're starting to offer alternatives as well.

4

What are the next steps?

timo

Created 2yCreated over 2 years agoUpdated 2yUpdated over 2 years ago

Here are some next steps we identified: - We’d like to find ways to integrate using our carbon footprint in the future. - We’d like to find more goods, that are grown in a regenerative way, as this is a farming method that can even capture CO2 during the production. - We’d like to incorporate nutritional value of products into this research. - We’d like to find more data on the difference of emissions across farming methods (conventional, organic, regenerative). - We’d like to find out our carbon footprint of the Kamp as a whole, including things like the gas for stove and shower, or the gasoline for the chainsaws.

Project Kamp is a project by One Army.Please sponsor the work or help us build the software.