[andrewcooke]

the article is misleading ("we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year") because it's using absolute numbers to boost what is a relative saving.

there are a lot of sauce bottles. even an unimportant saving will, totalled over all of them, add up to an impressive sounding number. but unless the fractional amount of each bottle is important, it's really not significant: saving a million tons of food in an industry that produces thousands of millions of tons of food is neither here nor there.

this is the same problem as residual current in phone chargers. if everyone unplugged their phone chargers when not in use we could save some impressive sounding amount of energy. except that, compared to total annual energy consumption, it's not impressive at all - it makes no practical difference to the very real issues related to energy consumption (because your phone charger's residual current is absolute peanuts compared to that vacation you took by plane).

it's a small point, but it bugs me. sorry.

personally, i would tend to prefer a glass container (glass seems like a nice stable chemical that i have evolved in the presence of (think rocks)). and if the world really needs to save ketchup maybe i could just eat a little more healthily and skip a serving once a month?

[RobAley]

Actually, when considering things like climate change, these small contributions are important, because they don't sit on their own. Most plans for significant carbon emission reductions that don't significantly change our standard of living rely on aggregating the savings made by many many "micro" reductions in production/consumption like this.

[andrewcooke]

i'm not going to argue here because http://www.withouthotair.com/ makes the point better than i ever could.

see, for example, http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c19/page_11... - Don’t be distracted by the myth that “every little helps.” If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little. We must do a lot. What’s required are big changes in demand and in supply.

and, of course, we may be talking at cross purposes - there is some middle ground where a large-ish number of small-ish things can help. i am not arguing against maths, but i am saying that our natural assessment of what is significant without actually doing the maths is often misled by absolute values, as here.

anyway, if you haven't read that book, i recommend it.

[RobAley]

Perhaps we are talking at cross purposes. I'm not saying "every little helps", more like "ALL little helps". Saving 5% of my ketchup doesn't help me save 5% of my carbon emissions. Saving 5% of the ketchup, 3% of the mayonnaise, 10% of the plastic bags, 7% of the car fuel etc. etc. does help.

I could probably meet my individual targets by simply taking a big action like scrapping my car. But I'm not going to do it (for various reasons), and most people won't either. I'm much more likely to meet them by skimming a small amount of the top of a lot of other things than changing my lifestyle significantly in one or two areas.

Big change is needed, but it can come from a few big things or many little things. I disagree with the sources that you cite only in so far as I think, given the society we live in, the little things route is much more likely to succeed, particular in the consumer arena.

I think we both agree that just a little bit of a little bit isn't going to help.