Big Impact via Small Actions
Climate change may seem like too enormous a problem to tackle—but big problems can be solved if many people take small actions.
Climate change may seem too enormous a problem to tackle—but big problems can be solved if many people take small actions. A famous story about former American Airlines President and Chairman Robert Crandall perfectly illustrates this phenomenon. Looking for ways to save the airline money and fuel, Crandall removed one olive from every salad served on American Airlines flights. No one missed the olive. This tiny action, repeated hundreds of thousands of times, reduced the cost of food by $40,000. It also potentially lowered fuel costs by not having to grow, harvest, and transport this single olive. Who would have thought a single olive could have such a big impact?
So, undoubtedly, a large number of small, collective actions outweigh fewer large actions. Many individual people taking small actions can create a big change, whether it is the grassroots funding of a Presidential election campaign or a Gofundme endeavor raising millions or, for that matter, hundreds of thousands of Uber and Lyft drivers providing necessary services in various cities, clocking millions of miles, driving billions in cumulative revenue.
And this same thinking, this same phenomenon, can be applied to climate change and water conservation. Let’s consider an everyday problem in most American homes — most people have to wait 30 to 45 seconds, even up to a minute, for hot water to get to their faucets—and all the while, good, clean water is running down the drain. If we add up those tiny amounts of time we wait, it amounts to six months of wasted water throughout a lifetime. Now multiply that by an average city of 200,000 people, and that’s three Olympic-size pools of water wasted daily. Along with the water wastage, there is also the energy used to source that water, treat it to make it potable, transport it to our homes, heat the water, and finally treat that good clean water going down the drains in our sewers. The city’s infrastructure to bring this additional water would have scaled approximately 12% larger on both the front and back end. If everyone in the city had a tankless water heater with built-in recirculation like an Intellihot i200P unit, it would solve this problem, give us six months of our life back, and be substantially better for the environment.
While there may not be a single scientific solution to a sustainable future, each of us has the power to contribute through small, everyday actions. We can choose electric cars and energy-efficient light bulbs, recycle, and use reusable bags. We can make a difference by inflating our car tires to the correct pressure for better fuel consumption. Another significant step is to buy and cook smaller portions of food, considering that the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates a staggering 30 to 40 percent of the United States’s food supply is wasted, corresponding to 30 to 40% more fuel and energy used to grow this food.
Such actions, when taken collectively, can lead to a sustainable future. Those may seem like small, insignificant actions, but the impact is significant when you add them up collectively. Even the tiniest of actions, multiplied by eight billion people, equals enormous action—and that is the only way we are going to get out of this crisis that affects us all, equally.