eco-strata

I recently noticed a seemingly healthy courier using the automatic door opener button – designed and installed to help handicapped people enter and exit buildings – to open the double doors that he wanted to pass through. I wondered how much electrical energy it took to open those doors, how much CO2 was released into the atmosphere as a result of producing that electrical power, and how many similar buttons this particular courier pressed during an average day. Then I wondered about the usage of this particular button and thought that it was possible that healthy people could be using the button more than handicapped people, those for whom the button was installed in the first place.

While pondering these questions I recalled hearing that if all electric front door bells were disconnected in Europe, somewhere around 1 or 2  large-scale power plants could be shutdown so I suspect that the impact of thousands of people needlessly using the automatic door opening system could likely consume a fair amount of energy and generate significant CO2 emissions.

I often hear people ask how they can help mitigate or slow climate change – a phenomena caused by increasing concentrations of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. Perhaps a really easy action would be to resist the temptation to use the handicapped person’s door opening button and instead use the handle which was designed and installed with healthy people in mind.

Alastair Moore lives in Vancouver and is an environmental consultant and co-founder of GreenWorks Building Supply.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 7:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.