What is your shopping footprint??

A shopping footprint is made up of the ways people shopping affects the environment. Shopping footprints include:
* the raw materials goods are made from
* how the goods are manufactured
* how goods are transported
* where goods are sold
* how the goods are packaged for sale

The shopping industry is made up if everything involved in the making and sale of the
things people buy. Farmers, manufacturers, shop owners ad ordinary people all benefit from the shopping industry. But shopping comes at a cost to the environment.


Rethink
Instead of throwing away old shoes & bags, give it to charity so that it can be used by someone else.
Altering clothes to fit better is better for the environment than buying new ones
Reuse and recycle and reduce your shopping footprint
Outdoor shopping malls use less lighting, heating and cooling than indoor malls so they have lighter environmental footprint.
Shopping online provides a good alternative to driving to shops
Every cent that someone spends in a retail store, increases the size of their shopping footprint.
Leaving extra packaging behind in the shop encourages manufacturing to use less packaging in the future.

How to work out your shopping footprint
On a piece of paper make a note of how regularly (never, sometimes, often) you:
travel to the shops in a car
go shopping without knowing exactly what you plan to buy
buy clothes and wear them only for one season
buy products because they are cheapest, without thinking about how long they might last
put packaging straight into the garbage without cutting out the bits that can be recycled.

If you’re answers are mostly never, you have a light shopping footprint
If you’re answers are mostly sometimes, means your footprints are average
Often you are trading heavily on the environment and leaving a deep footprint