Dahlia Breeze

Your carbon footprint is the amount of carbon monoxide you produce as an individual every year. The goal is to reduce your footprint by doing various things such as recycling, conserving energy, and purchasing bio-degradable products. But to reduce our carbon footprint we need to establish a bench mark to work from.

The National Wildlife Foundation has a calculator to help us set a baseline to work from.

My Carbon Footprint turned out to be 13,618 lbs. per year, or 7 tons, of carbon dioxide each year! It takes 545 trees to store this much carbon dioxide.

Ouch! I must admit, I was a little surprised at my carbon footprint number. I always thought I was aware of my impact on the environment.

I’m using this as a wake-up call. I know that I’m not the best at recycling or using less energy but I know I can do better. I’m a nature lover by heart and I hate to see our beautiful forests spotted with litter, or our beaches trashed, or our polar bears loosing less and less of their living environment.

I’ve scoured the internet to find easy, quick things that we can do that will have a big impact on our footprint numbers.

What you can do now:

1. Use less water
   • Take shorter showers
   • Put a full bottle of water in your toilet tank. This displaces the amount of water needed to fill your tank after use.
   • Water your plants with used cooking water. Most would see this water as waste water and it would go down the drain but in fact it is full of nutrients that your plants can use.
2. Use Less Energy
   • Turn the temperature down on your water heater. You’ll still have hot showers but this saves on the amount of energy being used to heat the water when not in use
   • Switch your lights to CFLs (compact fluorescent light bulbs). They can use up to 20% less energy and last about 10 times longer. They may pay for themselves
   • Unplug electronics that are not in use. Your DVD player, tv, cell phone charger, stereo. Even if you are not using them, they are still using energy to power the clock to other settings.
3. Create less waste
   • Use and bring your own cup to your favorite coffee shop or soda fountain. Most will give you a cup discount.
   • Put a fork and spoon in your lunch and reuse them instead of using disposable plastic ware.
   • Stop using paper plates. This is incredibly wasteful.

For More Information: Check out these sites

• Earth 911.org
• Tree Hugger.com
• National Wild Life Foundation

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