小房子对环境的影响很大：研究

小房子对环境的影响很大：研究

Tiny houses are annoyingly cute and wonderfully impractical. They’re also good for you — and everyone else.

小房子可爱得令人讨厌，又非常不实用。但它们对你和其他人都有好处。

Tiny house dwellers slashed their energy consumption by nearly half after downsizing, according to a new study by environmental design researcher Maria Saxton.

环境设计研究员玛丽亚·萨克斯顿的一项最新研究表明，小户型的居民能耗减少了近一半。

In her doctoral thesis, Saxton surveyed 80 people who had moved from a full-sized home to a “tiny” home for a year or more. She then calculated their ecological footprints, or how much space they need to sustain their current behavior, including housing, transportation, food, goods and services.

在她的博士论文中，萨克斯顿调查了80个人，他们从一个全尺寸的家搬到一个“小”家已经一年或更长时间了。然后，她计算了他们的生态足迹，或者他们需要多少空间来维持他们目前的行为，包括住房、交通、食品、商品和服务。

Her research showed that tiny home residents’ average ecological footprint was about 9.5 acres, down from about 17.3 acres for regular-sized homes.

她的研究显示，小户型居民的平均生态足迹约为9.5英亩，而普通户型居民的平均生态足迹约为17.3英亩。

In other words, tiny home residents reduced their energy consumption by 45%.

换句话说，小户型居民减少了45%的能源消耗。

Better still, she found that moving into a tiny house had a major impact on a person’s wasteful behavior generally.

更好的是，她发现搬到一个小房子里对一个人的浪费行为有很大的影响。

“As a whole, I found that after downsizing people were more likely to eat less energy-intensive food products and adopt more environmentally-conscious eating habits, such as eating more locally and growing more of their own food,” Saxton writes. “Participants traveled less by car, motorcycle, bus, train and airplane, and drove more fuel-efficient cars than they did before downsizing.”

萨克斯顿写道:“总的来说，我发现，换了小房子后，人们更有可能少吃能源密集型食品，养成更环保的饮食习惯，比如多在本地吃饭，多种植自己的食物。”“与换房前相比，受访者乘坐汽车、摩托车、公共汽车、火车和飞机的次数减少了，驾驶的燃油效率更高。”

They also recycled more and bought less consumer goods.

他们还回收了更多的垃圾，购买了更少的消费品。

Here’s to the gnome life.

为侏儒的生活干杯。