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.

Greening in Grim Times

With the economy in upheaval, Congress visioning and re-visioning industry bailouts and abandoning clean-energy tax credits, the health care debate tug-of-warring this way and that, and the environment under continuing assault, it's sometimes tempting to question - how much good can living green really do?

The luxuries of enviro-heedless daily American living surround us on all sides...high-tech petro-based cosmetics...sweatshop-manufactured designer clothing...toxin-emitting furniture, carpets, cabinets... mountaintops being exploded into rubble to keep our lights on and our computers running.

Even if you're committed to a green lifestyle, the relentless din of this consumerist world view can get wearing. In the midst of a hectic day, does it really matter that much to the planet if you drive to the 7-11 to pick up a pack of Clorox wipes instead of cycling to the health food store for white vinegar to use with your reusable cloth towels?

But there's a deeper question here - it's not a matter of harshly enforcing green discipline. Somewhere over the last sixty years or so, our culture has lost the skills...and joy...and value...of living simply, lightly, in balance with the natural world.

I took my 86-year-old father to Baltimore's Fair Trade coffeehouse and housewares shop, BlueHouse, awhile back. He browsed through the reclaimed-wood furniture, clay-based paints, flip-flop floor mats, recycled-metal utensils, and bamboo salad bowls with wonder.

As we sat with our cups of coffee, he told me, "This reminds me of what we used to do in the Depression, making everything count, not letting anything go to waste. Thing was, then we were all doing it in any way we could, to survive...here it's big business."

I thought of the way that experience shaped his adult life - planting a garden and putting up vegetables in the summer, repairing instead of buying new, sharing tools and odd jobs with neighbors, differentiating sharply between "want" and "need."

And I've come back to his comment again and again as the economic and environmental situations get increasingly dicey.

For decades now, most Americans have not felt a need to look at the world in that way, the way of "waste not, want not." Haven't felt a need to rely on practical ingenuity to make or fix or grow or share what we and our neighbors have or need.

Thanks to a global economy, we've had the products of the world at our fingertips. We've known we can find a dozen brands of whatever we need off the shelf at the grocery or housewares or convenience stores, or at the mall. And if it breaks, popular wisdom says, "Throw it out and get a new one!"

Yes, gurus of green living and simplicity remind us of age-old, earth-friendly ways to live...but let's face it, living green has been a choice, a counter-culture choice, always with the awareness that most of the population was doing it the easy, heedless way. Much as we may believe that the survival of the planet depends on our responsible choices, much as we buy with care and with an eye to the future, our immediate personal and family survival has not depended on our buying green.

More than that: we've had the option of buying wonderful, upscale, green alternative products. Not to denigrate these in any way! They set standards for environmentally responsible manufacturing at home and abroad, they reduce environmental exploitation, carbon and pollutant emissions, they support Fair Trade crafters in Third World cultures, they do (to borrow EBay's phrase) a world of good.

And - that said - how many of them are designed for a boutique economy of high incomes and higher expectations? I am writing with caution here - many of my clients are just such entrepreneurs, offering just such products, banking on the affluence of their clients to drive those products to success. Passionately promoting their healthiness and durability to convince upscale non-green prospects to buy not just a product but a principle.

But while this has contributed to a greater green awareness in upscale circles, it's also contributed to a popular impression that "green" means "trendy alternative" means "expensive" and "optional." Things you purchase to demonstrate your care for the planet and concern for your and your family's optimum health, not necessarily out of immediate need but as preventative medicine - "because you can." In a market of endless options, they have become yet another option, another niche.

How many people within this niche, however, are greening for the same reason that drove my father's generation - survival? Not just their personal physical survival, but for that of the planet and for the coming generations? And how many would feel impoverished if the endless product options now available suddenly...weren't?

What we're missing is the deeper cultural message - the message my father's generation lived, one of saving and sharing and pulling together. Looking past the "alternative" aspect of green products to the deeper principles behind them. Building community spirit to pull everyone through the tough times.

This is the underlying meaning of greening. We talk about the triple bottom line of green business, valuing People, Planet and Profit...we practice it as part of our business model. And I believe that as global fortunes shift, it's time to take it a step deeper. "Green" is not a niche of products or services, it's a way of seeing the world.

This ripples out especially to less-privileged individuals and families - those who are using toxic mainstream products because they are cheap and easily available, not knowing that simple, old-fashioned, non-upscale, non-boutique green options exist. If cultural greening is ever to be accomplished, these are the people to reach - the ones who will tip the balance not necessarily for the market but for the larger goal: the planet.

It's time to green our lives and expectations the old-fashioned way, by joyfully embracing earlier generations' values and life skills of simplicity, sharing and community. Reclaiming the values of ingenuity and creative survival, connection and cohesiveness.

As Sheryl Crow sang, "It's not having what you want, It's wanting what you've got. "

It's time to redefine "Because we can" from a statement of entitlement to a statement of empowerment...and discover a whole new level of meaning for greening.




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