How bad are bananas

Published

February 27, 2023

Recently, I have come a across a book that I find really wonderful: “How bad are bananas” by Mike Berners-Lee Berners-Lee ().

I would really like to use some of the data for a school project (of course citing the source in an adequate manner). It would be nice to use the data to develop a simple footprint calculator that is available online. Explicite permission from the author to use the data from his book with appropriate inidication of the data source is pending, however, with proper citation it should be okay to use the data I figure.

Reading notes

  • Carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e):
    • amount of CO2 that would have the same impact over a time of 100 years
    • Total impact in the UK
      • carbon dioxide 81%
      • methane 11%
      • nitrous oxide 5%
      • refrigerant and other gases 3%
  • Direct and indirect emissions
  • fold-width of confidence interval-like interval: approx: 10-fold
  • average footprint of a UK person: 13 tonnes per year
  • global average: 7 tonnes per year
  • A large cheeseburger (3.2 kg CO2e) corresponds to approx. 6 hours of a 5 tonne year

My own thoughts

  • Carbon responsibility should work like this:
    • The total CO2e emitted in the entire world should be estimated
    • The responsibilities should be attributed (algorithmically)

Issues

  • Is there a German translation?
  • I should buy paper copies!
  • Maybe initiate a school-project
  • Ask for permission about the book: info@howbadarebananas.com
  • Is there a good webpage belonging to the book?
  • Shiny app for “how much time of a 5 tonne year does this correspond to?”

Table

Here, I started to collect some of the data in the book and put them in a table:

CO2e Item
0.20 Pint of tap water
0.03 spam mail picked up by filter
0.20 short e-mail from phone to phone
0.30 short e-mail from laptop to laptop
17.00 long email that takes 10 minutes to write and 3 minutes to read, sent from laptop to laptop
26.00 an email that takes you 10 minutes to write, sent to 100 people, 99 of whom take 3 seconds to realise they should ignore it and on the whom reads it
0.50 one simple google search
5.60 5 minutes web browsing from a smartphone
8.20 5 minutes web browsing from a laptop
0.80 single text message
3.00 very lightweight plastic carrier bag
10.00 heavier supermarket bag
50.00 heavweight ‘bag for life’
2.00 Dyson Airblade
10.00 one paper towel
11.00 standard electric dryer
12.00 recycled and lightweight paper carrier bag
80.00 a fashion paper bag from mainly virgin paper
8.00 quick expert ironing of a shirt
14.00 average ironing
40.00 ironing of a thorougly crumped shirt
2.00 one hour zoom call on 13-inch Mac-Book Pro
10.00 one hour zoom call on an averagely efficient laptop
50.00 one hour zoom call on desktop computer
28.00 100g portion of carrots – local, in season, full-size varieties
83.00 100g portion of carrots – local, in season, baby carrots
90.00 100g portion of carrots – full-size varieties, shipped within Europe

Plots

References

Berners-Lee, Mike. 2020. How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything - 2020 New Edition. New ed. updat. and expand. Profile Books.