How Sustainable is my Lifestyle?

How sustainable is our lifestyle? This online tool helps calculating one's individual ecological rucksack within ten minutes. MIPS forms the conceptual framework; the abbreviation stands for Material Input per Service Unit. MIPS is an elementary measure to estimate the environmental impacts caused by a product or service. The whole life-cycle from cradle to cradle (extraction, production, use, waste/recycling) is considered. The ecological rucksack thus is the weight sum of all natural resources that are used for our consumption. This includes the products itself, their production, usage and disposal. In order to drive a car, not only the resources used to build the car and fuel it are taken into account, but also partly the iron ore mine, the steel mill, and the road network.

The tool was developed at the Wuppertal Institute and is now available in English.