140% too much

In Finland, the average person hit Earth Overshoot Day in 2024 on March 12th. If everyone on this planet lived like the average Finnish person, we would need 3.5 planets to sustain that level of consumption. This always has struck me as improbable because compared to many other developed countries I have visited, Finland is not particularly rich, nor is our lifestyle particularly extravagant or consumption-oriented.

However, according to the statistics, our consumption has always been up there with the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and other rich countries like Luxemburg and the United States. We are using more resources than many other well-off countries such as Sweden, Germany, or Switzerland. This year (2025), we did a bit better: we dropped from March 12 to April 6. Maybe it's our new atomic power plant or the recession, but we are not damaging our planet with the same vigor as in previous years.
 

My personal Earth Overshoot Day
Others do not always appreciate my frugal lifestyle, and to see whether I am truly exaggerating, I wanted to know on which date my personal Earth Overshoot Day falls. I took the test, and the result was a bummer: Despite

• not owning a car
• not traveling at all transcontinental
• limiting combined private and work air travel to two per year
• being a lacto-ovo-flexitarian
• buying maxmally one piece of clothing per year (except for socks and underpants)
• dumpster diving,

my personal Earth Overshoot Day was May 31. So I need 2.4 Earths to support my consumption. While that puts me in the lowest quarter of the Finnish population, a thief who only steals a little from the poor isn’t praised for his moderation — he’s still a thief. Admittedly, the online form did not ask about my clothing or dumpster diving habits, but the discrepancy is too big to be easily dismissed.
 

A sustainable life is close to impossible in Finland
Now, what is going on here? Even if we question the exact numbers, nobody in Finland will have an Earth Overshoot Day on December 31st (or later). There are a few reasons why it is almost impossible to reach this goal.

1. We need to generate a lot of heat to keep us warm in the winter. Yes, our houses are better insulated than in most other European countries (e.g., triple glass windows are standard), but outdoor temperatures do fall regularly below 0°C between October and April, despite global warming.
2. We use lots of space: Due to the cold climate, agriculture and forestry are less productive than in warmer countries. That makes for higher-quality wood. Strangely, and bad for the planet, most of it is burned for energy and heating. Due to the low population density of 16 inhabitants/square kilometer, we use much more infrastructure space per person than most other countries: roads, public spaces, transportation. And that space is not available for wildlife and carbon sequestration.
3. Heating a sauna uses a lot of energy. Like almost all Finns, we have a tiny 3 square meter (~30 square foot) sauna in our apartment. To heat it to 100°C, we have a 6 kW oven (one of the smaller devices on the market). Even a once-weekly sauna increases our electricity bill by 10-20%.
4. Much of the food needs to be transported for long distances because it simply doesn't grow locally. Together with this comes a very agro-industrial food sector. While you can buy all sorts of ultra-processed food made from wheat, it's almost impossible to buy wheat grain. And the ultraprocessed food comes sealed in two layers of plastic plus a cardboard box. While it is possible to buy green, you need to be at least upper-middle class to be able to do so. Paradoxically, processed food is less expensive, probably due to the economy of scale.

So what else can I do to lower my resource use? Any ideas? If I cannot reduce my consumption to be sustainable with one Earth, who can? Write me, because I want my Earth Overshoot Day to be on December 31st! michael@jeltsch.org