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Effect of consumption choices on fluxes of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus through households

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Abstract

Households are an important scale of analysis for human ecosystems because they are a major source of pollutants and could thus be a new focus for pollution management, particularly for education-based source reduction strategies. The household is also a meaningful unit for analysis of human ecosystems, being common to all human cultures. This study develops a Household Flux Calculator (HFC) to compute C, N, and P fluxes for scenarios intended to represent three levels of household consumption: low, typical, and high. All three scenarios were developed for suburban households with two adults and two children in the Minneapolis-St. Paul (Twin Cities) metropolitan area, Minnesota. Calculated ratios of fluxes between high and low consumption households were 3.5:1 for C, 2.7:1 for N and 1.4:1 for P. Results suggest a high level of discretionary consumption that could be reduced without a substantial reduction in standard of living. Thus, modest changes in behavior in high consumption households would greatly reduce fluxes of C, N, and P without major changes in lifestyle.

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Notes

  1. These household consumption typologies are culturally based. What is low for one country or culture may be high for another.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to C. Milesi and D. Nowak for providing model output used in our Household Flux Calculator. This research was supported by NSF Biocomplexity Proejct EAR-0322065 to L. Baker.

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Correspondence to Lawrence A. Baker.

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Baker, L.A., Hartzheim, P.M., Hobbie, S.E. et al. Effect of consumption choices on fluxes of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus through households. Urban Ecosyst 10, 97–117 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-006-0014-3

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