A year without internet consumption: This is how successful the local self-experiment was!

A year without internet consumption: This is how successful the local self-experiment was!

Editor Julia Gerold from MeinBezirk experimented on herself without online shopping for a whole year. Their goal: to support the local economy and live more sustainably. Despite the challenges posed by local businesses, she documented her orders carefully and found that it wasn't always easy to forego digital consumption in our digital world. In total, she only received nine packages, although looking back she notes that she could have reduced it to seven. Avoiding online shopping was not only a conscious decision for the environment, but also a step to strengthen regional commerce, which Gerold sees as an ongoing battle for diversity in city centers, as many opaque factors cause local shops to disappear, as she has reported.

The advantages of doing without are clear: every online order causes between 200 and 400 grams of CO2 emissions, which increase dramatically with international deliveries. The Austrian Statistics Austria reported that around 389 million packages would be shipped in 2023, which makes the problem appear all the more acute. But Gerold also reminded that offline shopping comes with its own challenges: local prices are often higher and the product selection is limited, which requires extensive planning. Despite the difficulties, the experiment shows that a sustainable lifestyle is possible and that digital excess can be reduced.

Consumer calm and conscious purchasing