City dwellers pollute more than country folk

Residents of centre of Helsinki pollute more than those in suburbs

print this

By Anna-Sofia Berner
     
      “We are not particularly ecological”, says Kati Ankkuri.
      That really would seem to be the case. The Ankkuris live in Loppi, in the middle of the forest. It is nearly three kilometres to the nearest paved road, and eight to the closest village.
      Kati Ankkuri works 30 kilometres away in Riihimäki. Pekka Ankkuri drives 60 kilometres a day to Hämeenlinna. Lassi, 12, and Matias, 10, go to school in the village, where they also play floorball. The store is also in the village.
      Without a car, these people couldn’t get anywhere.
     
And that’s not all. Their house of 130 square metres of floor space has electric heating. However, they only use it in the toilet, the bathroom, and the hallway on very cold days.
      Heat for the rest of the house comes from two wood-burning stoves, and the firewood is from their own forest.
      The choice of wood heating was not made for any reasons of green ideology: it was a combination of the high cost of electricity and a sense of defiance.
      Spiralling electricity prices annoyed Pekka Ankkuri so much that he would rather wear woollen socks inside than switch on the electric heat.
     
But let’s leave the Ankkuris in Loppi for a while and travel from the countryside to the city, to Espoonlahti on the western edges of Espoo.
      We turn off the Länsiväylä motorway and drive past low apartment buildings. They are followed by a winding road with trees, fences, and detached houses built in close proximity. This Espoo idyll is home to consultant Antti Hakkarainen, his wife, and their three children.
      “We really are quite green”, Hakkarainen says.
      Both adults in the family commute by bus to work in the centre of Helsinki, which is 20 kilometres away.
      Hakkarainen calculated already in the 1990s that he saves 50 minutes a day this way.
     
The green lifestyle is not limited to the use of public transport. The family keeps the indoor temperature cool, favours organic food and food that is grown nearby, avoids eating beef, grows garden vegetables, and avoids unnecessary driving to the summer cottage 60 kilometres away.
      For foreign holidays they go to Greece, and not Thailand, and they travel abroad only once a year.
      “Even that is quite a bit in my opinion.”
      Nevertheless, the Hakkarainens’ carbon footprint is not necessarily smaller than that of the Ankkuris - not much anyway.
     
For a moment, please forget everything that you have learned about how ecological city life is - that how dense housing, where trams and trains bring people to services, is automatically more climate-friendly than the sparsely-populated countryside, or even suburban areas.
      This is actually not the case.
      Dense urban structures certainly do offer advantages in that they make everyday life run more smoothly, but this does not necessarily reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
      City dwellers today actually pollute the atmosphere more than country people.
     
These are conclusions that have been drawn by Aalto University researcher Jukka Heinonen and real estate expert Professor Seppo Junnila.
      Heinonen divided all of Finland into countryside, built-up areas, cities, and the Helsinki region, and compared the carbon footprints of the residents of the different environments.
      The conclusion: the more densely people live, the greater the emissions.
      This applied to all aspects of the study with the exception of driving. Heating, building maintenance, construction, recreational services, perishable goods, and foreign travel all result in greater emissions in cities than in the countryside.
     
Heinonen and Junnila note that there is a prevailing view that when people live closer together, their carbon footprint decreases.
      “I can say with a good deal of certainty that this is not the case”, Junnila says.
      Living in a city is not inherently green.
     
So what are we supposed to think? Is Nurmijärvi, which was much praised by former Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, actually a better place to live from the point of view of the environment than Kerava and Hyvinkää, which lie along the main railway line north of Helsinki?
      No it is not.
      There are country people who live green, and there are those who pollute. The people in Nurmijärvi are largely in the second category.
     
The carbon footprint of the residents of Nurmijärvi is 25 per cent greater than that of Helsinki.
      Emissions from Espoo residents are also greater than those of people living in Helsinki.
      “People in Nurmijärvi and Espoo build big houses, they own two cars, and they consume heavily in all of these categories”, Heinonen says.
      Therefore, it is not possible to draw the conclusion from Heinonen’s and Junnila’s study that everyone should move to the countryside.
      The right conclusion is that future low-carbon residential areas can be located either in the countryside or in cities - both in the centre or in the suburbs.
      “Many would like to move a bit further out and live in a more rural manner. At least on this basis it is not possible to say that this would be a development which would not be wished for. It depends on all kinds of other choices”, Heinonen says.
     
The researchers say that there are more opportunities in the countryside to influence these choices than in the city.
      “In the city it is possible to influence this one thing - transport”, Junnila points out.
      The notion that cities are better than the country is largely based on the excessive focus on transport.
      “Transportation has been in a completely dominant role in this debate, even though it is not the central source of emissions by any measure”, Jukka Heinonen says.
     
Instead of transportation, Heinonen and Junnila emphasise the primary importance of energy production, followed by construction and living.
      But of course it would be most important to change all of this radically. Junnila gives an example.
      “In Austria the definition of a passive energy house includes that it has no heating system at all.”
     
It is hardly a surprise to anyone that there are high-emission SUV drivers living in Espoo and Nurmijärvi.
      But it is quite possible to damage the climate without long commutes or a big detached house, and to do so in the middle of a densely-built city with good public transport.
      In Helsinki, residents of the centre of the city emit more pollutants than those living on the edges of town.
     
The urban lifestyle - shopping, restaurants, cinemas, museums, theatres, cafes, travel, and all those other fun things warm the environment.
      People moving from the city to the countryside do not necessarily give up the urban lifestyle. Even in Nurmijärvi, 75 per cent of driving takes place during free time. People drive away from there, to where there are more people and more services.
      This is the very worst alternative: people don’t live in the city, but not actually in the country, either.
     
So let’s go back to Loppi, to the home of the automotive Ankkuri family.
      Behind their white wooden fence is an old maple tree that dominates the neat front yard. The log cabin built in the 1920s was expanded a couple of years ago.
      The annex is not easy to distinguish unless one looks closely.
      "When we planned the extension, many asked us why we don’t bulldoze the old one”, Kati Ankkuri says.
      “I don’t understand that kind of thinking at all.”
     
Junnila and Heinonen also do not understand. They emphasise that fixing that which is old is often better for the climate than building something new.
      An appreciation for what is old is also apparent in the interiors in the Ankkuri house. Most of the furniture was previously owned by parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.
      “These are my treasures”, Kati Ankkuri says.
     
The Ankkuris do not see their interior decorating style as recycling. For them, the recycling of trash and children’s clothing is self-evident.
      Common sense says that goods that are useable and in good repair should not be thrown away.
      The Ankkuris like being at home. “When we come home, we hardly bother going anywhere else.”
      People who live in the countryside do not need a summer cottage. The Ankkuris do not want to travel abroad every year. Last autumn they were in Rome with friends, and before that, three years ago they were in Denmark and before that, errrr... in Sweden - perhaps.
     
Although the Ankkuris commute to cities to work, they are not much interested in urban delights.
      After work they do not stay and shop, nor do they drive to eat at restaurants.
      “We don’t spend time shopping”, Kati Ankkuri says.
      “You were just in Helsinki”, her husband points out.
      “And when was the last time before that? Five years ago!”
     
Kati Ankkuri, who grew up in Riihimäki, does miss one thing about city life: the possibility to walk or cycle from one place to another.
      The Ankkuris were long envious of their city friends who could manage with just one car in the family.
      “But now most of them also have two cars now.”
     
So city people consume more than people in the countryside. There is also more wealth in the cities than in the country, and the individual's carbon footprint is usually the bigger the more money that he or she has to use.
      Things could be different in the future. As zero-energy houses are built, emissions will not grow even if floor space increases.
      However, it will be some time before that happens, so fortunately people’s consumption habits are not a natural force of any kind – not even in Espoo.
      Antti Hakkarainen is a good example. He likes to drive, and suffers from car fever, especially in the springtime.
     
“Sometimes it occurs to me that I could reward myself by buying something, like a convertible or a motorboat."
      But Hakkarainen resists the temptation. The family car was bought in 2003. It is driven just 10,000 kilometres a year. The outboard motor at their summer cottage runs on electricity.
     
Hakkarainen got his green awakening in the early 1990s. Since then he has followed the reports of the World Watch Institute on the state of the world, and has read the final report of the International Climate Panel.
      “Now I get a greater satisfaction from living in an environmentally friendly manner than from mindless consumption.”
     
Although Hakkarainen makes active ecological choices, he does not know how important they really are.
      Compared with his prosperous fellow Espoo residents, his carbon footprint is certainly smaller. But the world cannot be saved through consumer choices alone.
      Political decisions are also needed: strict building standards, emission ceilings for energy companies, and support for companies that conserve energy.
     
The Lippulaiva shopping mall, the closest place for the Hakkarainens to shop, has a large excavated pit across the street from it, with water at the bottom. The pit is surrounded by a construction area fence.
      Six months ago, the Ulappatori shopping centre was still there. Now there is a sign erected by the YIT construction company declaring that apartment houses will be built on this site.
      “This is getting quite a bit denser. That school will also go away”, Antti Hakkarainen says pointing in the other direction.
     
Hakkarainen is pleased, because he has accepted the notion that a compact residential area is more ecological.
      “A Metro station will be built somewhere over there”, he says, waving in the direction of the pit.
      Hakkarainen and his family are already looking forward to it. For now, buses and cars drive by.
     
When Hakkarainen was a teenager in the early 1980s there were fewer than 30,000 people living in the Espoonlahti area. Now there are 50,000 residents, and the area is still lush with vegetation.
      The Hakkarainen home is 700 metres from Lippulaiva. They live in one half of a duplex which was built in 1980.
      The family has dreamed about a more spacious dwelling, but they do not want to move out of the pleasant neighbourhood. If they were to build a home of their own they would have to put it somewhere where they would need two cars, and they do not want to do that.
     
The 148 square metres of living space are heated with district heat. They can see their own yard from the large window in the living room. There is a terrace in the yard which they plan to glaze, reducing the need for heating in the living room.
      Others in the housing corporation (comprising four households) are also interested in energy efficiency.
      Thermal-imaging camera pictures were recently taken of the buildings, and there are plans to improve their insulation. The residents have also planned to utilise solar energy. Solar collectors would easily fit on the black roofs of the garages.
      “However, at the engineering office they said that nobody has ever combined them with district heating.”
     
There has also been talk of switching to heat pump heating, but the residents are under the impression that it would not be allowed on their property. So for now they are sticking to district heat, whose carbon footprint is determined by the energy utility Fortum.
      The housing corporation that the Hakkarainens belong to is exceptionally interested in energy. Many Finns spend as much on SMS messages as they do on electricity, and a refurbishment of a kitchen can cost the equivalent of 20 years of heating bills. Consequently many do not think very much about energy.
      Hakkarainen also recognises this. He would have no problem paying more for electricity.
      “An electricity bill of 60 euros is not much in the costs of a family like this.”
     
The door opens and the family’s eldest, 12-year-old Petro, comes in.
      He has heard this conversation before. “We live reeeally ecologically.”
      A while ago the boys would have wanted the family to get an SUV as their next car.
      “When we explained why we wouldn’t be getting one, the boys understood”, their father says.
      Petro has also dreamed of getting a motorcycle to ride to the summer cottage. “But I don’t want it any more.”
     
Other families are not as strict. The Hakkarainens can see this behind the fence.
      On the way to the bus stop, three SUVs drive by, and with the arrival of spring, the family’s teenagers have taken motorcycles and scooters out of their garages.
      Hakkarainen’s enthusiasm for the green cause is a source of benevolent amusement among his friends and acquaintances. However, the laughter has declined in recent years.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 22.5.2011
     


Previously in HS International Edition:
  My life as an eco-freak (17.5.2011)
  WWF report: Finns´ ecological footprint third-heaviest in world (25.10.2006)

Links:
  Calculating your carbon footprint

ANNA-SOFIA BERNER / Helsingin Sanomat