The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
In 2015, the United Nations created 17 goals targeting several global issues such as poverty, hungry, education, gender equality, etc. The hope is for the world to achieve this goal by 2030. Freeganism directly affects at least two of the UN Sustainable Goals: Goal 12- Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns, and Goal 13- Take urgent action to combat climate change an its impacts.
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Goal 12: Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
Sustainable consumption and production is greatly about promoting resource and energy efficiency, and aims at “doing more and better with less.” This means “increasing net welfare gains by reducing resource use, degradation and pollution along the whole life cycle, while increasing quality of life.”
Freeganism works toward this by placing emphasis on minimizing waste and participation in society’s consumerism. Freegans “do more and better with less” because they do not buy new goods or products, they only live with what they have found, traded, or grown themselves. By reducing consumption of goods and resources, freegans produce less waste; they even remove certain waste (such as food waste) from going into the landfill by dumpster diving. This minimization of waste and prevention of produce going into the landfill (which helps to improve climate change) works towards sustainable consumption of resources and helps to improve degradation and pollution of the natural earth. |
Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
Due to climate change, global weather is becoming more severe and sea levels are rising rapidly. Such changes directly affect the lives of many around the world; the poorest and most vulnerable are being affected the most.
The main cause of climate change is the Greenhouse effect, which is when gases in the atmosphere such as water vapor, CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, and CFCs allow sunlight and heat to enter the earth’s atmosphere, but prevent them from escaping. The more greenhouse gases there are in the atmosphere, the more heat gets trapped around the earth, therefore intensifying the Greenhouse effect and increasing the earth’s temperature. Landfill emissions greatly contribute to the greenhouse effect due to the large amounts of methane being produced from decomposing produce in landfills. Since methane is 30 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, methane emissions are a huge contributor to climate change, and can only be reduced by decreasing the amount of produce that goes into landfills. This is because the when produce is dumped in landfills, the lack of oxygen causes the produce to take longer to decompose, which produces more methane emissions. |