You can do each of these steps straight away and they will begin to reduce your carbon footprint:
- Sign up to a green energy supplier who supply electricity from renewable sources such as wind and hydro-electric.
- Turn electrical items off at the wall when you’re not using them.
- Turn down the central heating (for those of you in the UK) and turn up the air-conditioning to 24 degrees centigrade (for Aussies).
- Turn down the water heating temperature a couple of degrees. There’s no point in burning yourself while you’re trying to get your shower temperature right.
- If you’re making a cup of coffee for one person, use enough water for only one person.
- Unplug your mobile after it’s finished charging.
- Run to the gym instead of drive. Not only will this stop you producing carbon dioxide from your car but you’ll ask yourself why the chuff you’re paying for a gym membership when you could be running instead.
- Recycle as much as you can. Or as much as your council will let you with their pathetic attempts at collecting your recyling rubbish.
Of course there are lots of other things you could do to help lower your carbon footprint but a lot of them would make your life unbearable or are just unfeasible to most people. I’ll list a few to give you an idea:
- Don’t drink bottled water. Unless your tap water tastes like shite and brown stuff comes out of it after a storm.
- Buy only organic produce. Great idea and possible in some countries but if you do this in Australia your house will be repossessed pretty sharpish and you can’t forget the ‘credit crunch’ these days.
- Grown your own fruit and veg. Hmmm, that’s ok if you’ve got a garden, you don’t rent, you have some idea of how to keep off insects and you don’t have to go to work to pay the aforementioned rent so that you can garden all day.
- Ride a bicycle to work. So that you get there in your suit all sweaty and get the nickname ’stinky’.
- Use biodiesel in your diesel car. Once again, not a bad idea except the governments around the globe tend to sting you for using it so much that you may as well not bother.
Anyway, that’s enough of that - you get the picture. A little is better than none.
May 6, 2008
Though we call them “lights,” traditional incandescent bulbs are actually small heaters that produce a little light — and waste a lot of energy making heat. (You know this if you’ve touched one that’s been on for a while!) In the 1880s, they revolutionized the world. But today, we can do better.
Better alternatives use more efficient technology
Once dismissed as buzzing tubes in offices, fluourescent lights have gone compact and upscale. Energy-saving compact fluorescents (CFs) now rival the cozy, warm light of traditional bulbs. They use a fraction of the electricity, which means lower electricity bills and millions of tons less global warming pollution. And in the summer, because they don’t burn as hot as incandescent bulbs, they’ll lower your cooling bills.
If every household replaced just three 60-watt incandescent bulbs with CF bulbs, the pollution savings would be like taking 3.5 million cars off the road!
May 5, 2008
Whilst you can minimise your carbon footprint you will never be able to reduce your carbon emissions to zero. Whilst I’m typing this I’m using electricity which is affecting my carbon footprint. It is, however, possible to offset your carbon footprint by planting trees that will absorb the amount of carbon dioxide that you generate.
The plant-a-tree-today organisation can help you calculate your carbon footprint and will plant trees to offset it on your behalf.
May 5, 2008
The carbon footprint is a measure of the exclusive global amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases emitted by a human activity or accumulated over the full life cycle of a product or service (see Wiedmann and Minx, 2008).
The life cycle concept of the carbon footprint means that it is all-encompassing and includes all possible causes that give rise to carbon emissions. In other words, all direct (on-site, internal) and indirect emissions (off-site, external, embodied, upstream, downstream) need to be taken into account.
Normally, a carbon footprint is expressed as a CO2 equivalent (usually in kilograms or tonnes), which accounts for the same global warming effects of different greenhouse gases (UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology POST, 2006). Carbon footprints can be calculated using a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method, or can be restricted to the immediately attributable emissions from energy use of fossil fuels.
An alternative definition of the carbon footprint is the total amount of carbon dioxide attributable to the actions of an individual (mainly through their energy use) over a period of one year. This definition underlies the personal carbon calculators. The term owes its origins to the idea that a footprint is what has been left behind as a result of the individual’s activities. Carbon footprints can either consider only direct emissions (typically from energy used in the home and in transport, including travel by cars, airplanes, rail and other public transport), or can also include indirect emissions (including CO2 emissions as a result of goods and services consumed). Bottom-up calculations sum attributable CO2 emissions from individual actions; top-down calculations take total emissions from a country (or other high-level entity) and divide these emissions among the residents (or other participants in that entity).
Read more at Wikipedia.
May 5, 2008
