User:Mfir2020/sandbox

History

 * 1960's - The "back-to-the-land movement" promoted self-sufficiency and local community growth.
 * 2007 - The transition town network was formed to reduce dependency on oil in the United Kingdom.
 * 2007 - The United Nations published Sustainable Consumption Patterns, which outlined small scale sustainability actions.
 * 2009 - Jesse Stallone coined the term micro and macro sustainability based off the ideas of microeconomics and macroeconomics.

Individual actions
Micro-sustainability is the result of individuals and communities practicing sustainable living. Sustainable living is a lifestyle that attempts to conserve natural resources. Within an individual household, this can include reducing the water footprint and domestic energy consumption of the building.

Water footprint
With a typical American single-family home using 70 US gallons (260 L) per person per day indoors, upgraded household appliances such as toilets, showers, dishwashers, and washing machines can be installed to reduce usage.

Energy consumption
The residential sector accounts of 21% of total U.S. energy usage with approximately 40% of the energy used in homes being used for heating. Individuals can reduce their heating loads by improving their building insulation, improving building airtightness and installing smart thermostat. Other measures outside of reducing the heating load include purchasing energy efficient appliances, and recycling energy intensive materials.

Consumer preferences
As individuals become more aware of environmental problems that exist, their consumption decisions can promote green designs and ultimately affect the types of products on the market. In a study that looked at consumer preferences for sustainability with respect to mobile phones, it found that consumers are not only interested in the physical product but also raw material sourcing and end of life product disposal. As a result, the study found that major manufacturers consider sustainability in their marketing and products.

Other studies have looked at consumer preferences regarding sustainably sourced food. Food sustainability can reduce the use of natural resources and limit waste. These improvements in food sustainability can have larger, global benefits such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, water usage, and waste. One study found that consumers who spent more time looking at the sustainability labels were individuals who cared more about sustainably sourced food and were more likely to select products with this labeling. Another study showed that not only does sustainable labeling cause consumers to look at the product for longer, but that the consumer choices as a result of that labeling is significant and positive. This means that if consumers value sustainability labeling and are more likely to purchase these products, food producers and marketers can use this information to provide products that consumer is interested in. Not only do these studies show that consumers are interested in sustainable food choices, but they also provide an incentive and reward producers that are willing to provide responsibly sourced food.

Group and community actions
A community in the context of micro-sustainability is a group of people in the same geographic location that interact with one another. These can range from rural communities with low population density to highly dense urban communities. These communities are able to tackle a wider range of initiatives that range in scale from unaligned, independent affairs to organized networks. While small community initiatives can take many forms, they can be generalized as an organized collective bundle of actions stretching several years or decades intended to transform a community into a sustainable state.

Rural communities
Although there is no exact population size to define a rural community, they are typically seen as areas with lower population density. Green rural communities are places where people value a supportive social network and a low-impact, ecologically sustainable life. These can be defined as transition towns, Low Carbon Communities, or eco-villages.

Urban communities
Urban communities do no necessarily mean a larger population than rural communities, but rather they are more densely populated and are forced to deal with the effects of urbanization. Especially with transition towns and low carbon communities, the goal is to see if fundamental changes to society in these niches can lead to a wider acceptance of the innovation. This can occur by replicating, scaling-up, and translating successful practices. Although the goal is to see if changes on micro scale will ultimately lead to a successful macro level change, 89% of transition towns were created by individual citizens coming together, not governments or larger organizations.

Criticisms
There have been concerns about the effectiveness of micro-sustainability. Much of the research into individual and small community practices are only able to analyze a limited amount of data and cannot say fully say if the small community changes will result in changes at a larger scale. Additionally, due to its complex nature, it is almost impossible to model or keep track of all aspects of sustainability, and studies that do attempt to model this found that successful situations at a micro level will either not work or will worsen environmental impacts at a larger scale.

Additionally, some raise questions about the magnitude of change that needs to occur. David J.C. MacKay was a British physicist, mathematician, and academic who wrote the book Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air. In it he advocates against small changes with respect to sustainability and gives the example that if everyone unplugged their chargers from the outlet, this would save enough energy to power 66,000 homes for one year. MacKay warns that these types of statements can be misleading as 66,000 homes out of approximately 25 million homes participating in this action is a quarter of one percent. In other words, each household is only saving one quarter of one percent by unplugging their phones.

A study that surveyed transition towns across the UK found that many (76%) of them struggle to grow after initial interest fades. This indicates that scaling up beyond committed environmentalist my not be the best approach.