Project Living life reduced climate impact by 14% for participants

Published on November 12, 2020

It was a collaborative project run by Gothenburg city. Eleven families were coached to live a more enjoyable and environmentally friendly life for one year. Their efforts had a great impact in media and made more people interested to do the same. The families have shown that there is a great potential to reduce environmental impact in everyday life, by saving resources and being aware of consumption. One new thing about the project was the inclusion well-being in an environmental project.

The project promotes sustainable consumption by delivering a method and figures on how much an ordinary family is able to reduce overall climate impact, waste and energy and live a good life with high well-being at the same time. The results from the follow up and measurement with the digital tool Klimatkontot show signs that the effects may be durable. The last measurements were carried out after the project was completed, which in practice was three to eleven months after the families carried out challenges that clearly affected the climate impact. The measurement directly after the project was completed shows a reduction of an average of 14 percent (from 7 to 6 tons) compared to the measurement made at the start of the project. The average electricity saving was 15 percent (based on all 11 families). Four of the families succeeded very well and decreased by over 25 percent, the one who succeeded best saved as much as 44 percent. For other families, the reductions were significantly smaller, in some cases the use of electricity also increased (in one case this was due to renovation work). The results from the waste challenge are based on weightings of the waste for ten of the eleven families participating in the Leva Livet project. The figures are, as far as we know, the first to be presented about how much an individual family can reduce in total the amount of food waste, ordinary rubbish and packaging. On average, families reduced their waste by a quarter. Food waste decreased by a quarter, newspapers by a tenth and ordinary rubbish decreased by about 40 percent. Packaging increased by five percent, as more families started to sort more. If everyone lived like the families who reduced their waste the most, the amount of waste would only be a fifth of today's level in Gothenburg. The amount of food and packaging saved would correspond to the carbon dioxide emissions from 12,000 Gothenburgers every year. Contact elina.jarkil@kom.goteborg.se in Gothenburg city.