The unsustainability of the election campaigns

by Roberto Cavallo

The environmental impact of the election campaign: we have wasted at least 140,000 trees, enough water to fill over 450 Olympic swimming pools and we used the energy produced by a medium-large thermoelectric plant .

Whether it produces a lot of paper in electoral periods, for the truth a little too frequent in Italy, is intuitive.
Occurring noise in the courses of the various ads and rallies is also known, especially to our ears.
When they are attending various banquets we can not fail to note the increase in the number of gadgets to catch the attention of potential voters.
Fortunately, the gadgets are often functional so that, before becoming a refusal can be used to write down those who do not vote, as in the case of multi-pen, or to tear and a smile to stop a crying baby, such as balloons or chocolates.
There are also cases where the gadgets are actually antithetical to the role, for example, a candidate mayor should be, is the case of some candidates who have distributed bottles of half litre of mineral water competitor of the “Water of the Mayor" that he should commit itself to improve, even to make families save.

But the most striking is certainly what I initially called intuitive.
In this election campaign, that in my district has summed 3 levels (municipal, provincial, European), I have kept and weighed all the printed materials, in some cases, packed in plastic.

7 envelopes and letters from 28 grams each from some of the 6 candidates for mayor, a booklet with the program from one of the candidates from 120 grams, countless "holy" (and leaflets denigrating their opponents) of candidates for municipal counsellors a complex of about 750 grams, which add about 450 grams of candidates to provincial and approximately 350 grams for candidates to the European Parliament.
So a total of just over one kilo and eight hundred grams of paper and not even a product made from recycled paper!
This is certainly a lower than average since I live in a house whose single gate isn’t on a main street, and then the pit of letters is not very visible and much less attractive than those in the battery of a large block.

I am not wrong if it approximates to two kilograms, the paper received in this period, about 1% of the total paper and paperboard consumption annually placed second COMIECO (2006 figures).
Two kilos for the 673 thousand 113 million 34 voters (source ADNKronos) called to choose municipal councils and provincial councils and a kilo of paper for the difference compared to 50,664,596 of Italians (the source Sole24 hours) called to express their vote.

From these calculations show that this election has produced some 77,341,967. 5 pounds of paper, that is little more than 77 thousand tons, without ballot or referendum, the amount that is collected carefully from about 1 million inhabitants!

Still convinced this is an underestimated and hope that throughout this paper is finished in the collection I try to assess environmental impacts in terms of emissions of this election campaign.

Given that one ton of paper from virgin materials requires 2 tonnes of wood (about fifteen poplars, 44 cubic meters of water and 4600 kWh of electricity, in this election campaign we lost 140mila trees, enough water to fill more than 450 Olympic swimming pools and we used more than 350,000 MWh, that is the energy produced by a thermoelectric plant medium-large.

I would like to make it an effort to merge the elections and therefore the election campaigns.
I would like the candidates to use at least recycled paper that would save 100 thousand tons of CO2.
I would like that Internet was more used.
...Or maybe I like that the candidates returned in person to talk ...and listen to me!