Students from around the world calculated their class mean and standard deviations for their footprints and posted them on our world map.
Do you see differences across the globe? If so, why do you think those differences exist?
Did you use the calculator to try to reduce your footprint down to the average from a citizen of another country? What changes would you have to make to lower your footprint in this way? Are you going to try and take some of these actions in your daily life?
Student Footprints >
Carbon Footprint: Transportation
When I calculated my carbon footprint I was proud, shocked, and disappointed all at the same time.
I was under the average in all of the categories except for one, I was really proud of this. My family has always tried to be eco friendly, we turn off the lights, we compost, use LED lights, we take short showers, only run our washing machine, dryer, and dishwasher when they are full, and we only use reusable water bottles and containers. I was happy to see that our effort was actually doing something good.
When it came to my transportation category I was way over the average, by ten times. I was floored by this! I couldn’t believe that I was sooo far over the average. I almost always carpool and I drive a car with good gas mileage, so how could I be ten times the average? It was the flights that kill me. Over this past year I was lucky enough to go to the Galapagos with my school and study the tortoises there, it was an amazing experience. However, it took us three flights to get from San Francisco to the Island of Baltra and three flights to get home. That’s a total of 23 hours of flying. In addition, I also went to Europe and took four flights to get there and back, which is an additional 27 hours of flying.
This got me thinking if there were anyway to make flying more eco friendly. Immediately an article from the Washington Post popped up, I’ll put the link below. In the article, it stated that this new engine, PurePower, will use 16% less fuel, which will dramatically lower its carbon footprint. In addition to reducing the carbon footprint this new plane will also reduce its noise footprint by 75%, which is amazing especially because I live near an airport. The PurePower engine already has over 6,000 orders and is looking forward to changing the way we fly.