How Big Is Your Footprint - In the Atmosphere?

When you’re planning to green your home or business, one of the terms you’ll hear often is reducing your carbon footprint. What does this mean, and why is it important?

Your carbon footprint is one way of measuring your impact on the planet. It represents the total amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are emitted as a result of your lifestyle, business operations, and daily activities. It can include direct factors such as:

• the kind of fuel you use to heat your home


• the efficiency of your HVAC system


• the kind of fuel your car uses, and its efficiency


• the kind of lawnmower, leaf-blower, tiller, etc. you use – gas, electric, or battery-powered?


• and so forth

But your carbon footprint isn’t limited to the gases that are emitted by the machines and appliances you personally operate. Like karma, it also reflects your global impact through things you pay for, but do not do directly. Just to give four examples:

• How Is Your Electricity Generated? The vast majority –-98% percent -- of energy companies use a mix of nonrenewable power sources: coal, natural gas, petroleum, and nuclear energy, and large hydropower. A few other companies, such as CleanCurrents provide energy generated through renewable sources.


• How Much Energy Do You Consume by Turning On the Faucet? Public water supply and treatment facilities use an average of 56 billion kilowatt hours of energy per year – enough to power 5 million homes for that same period. At that rate, running your faucet for just five minutes consumes enough energy to power a 60-watt light bulb for 14 hours – and that’s not even including the energy it would take to heat that water.


• What Happens to Your Trash after Pickup? On the average, each American generates roughly 4.72 pounds of trash per day, of which only about 1.5% is recycled. If the rest is hauled to a landfill, it adds to a toxic cocktail of greenhouse gases including methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, sulfur, mercury and occasionally even radioactive pollutants such as tritium.


• How Far Has Your Food Traveled? In most American supermarkets, we expect to see fresh produce throughout the year, regardless of the season where we live. But what’s the cost of this year-round harvest? You guessed it – the emissions of countless ships, planes and trains as our fruits and veggies are transported to us from around the world. To give you an idea of the impact you can have: just by eating local food once a week, you’ll be saving 2.5 tons of CO2. And of course you won’t just be fighting global warming…you’ll be gaining the whole Farmer’s Market or co-op experience, going to “market day” with your neighbors and local farmers every week.

These are just a few of the many factors that combine to make up your carbon footprint. To discover your own environmental impact, check out the EPA’s carbon calculator.

Once you know the size of your carbon footprint, you'll probably want to take action to reduce it. And you may wonder - are carbon offsets a solution?

Carbon offsets enable you to pay for carbon-neutralizing projects - such as planting trees, for example - to balance out the carbon emissions released through your everyday activities at home, work, traveling, etc. While this might sound like the lazy person's way to a clear green conscience, that's not the idea.

Remember the old saying, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?" That's the principle behind carbon offsets. They're designed to serve as the last step you take after you have eliminated as many sources of carbon emissions from your lifestyle as possible.

Once you've made as many changes as you can to reduce carbon emissions from your home and your workplace, once you've eliminated high-emission forms of travel such as flying and substituted greener solutions - then you can go ahead and use offsets to balance out the remainder.

To learn how you can reduce or eliminate sources of carbon emissions from your lifestyle, come and visit me at my eco-consulting site.