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 >
Recycling and Composting
For me two of the bigger parts of my carbon footprint that was not transportation was my recycling and composting. I noticed that I do not recycle very much and my family don’t really do any composting. Now I didn’t really think about this until I recently started studying this subject in school, but this really has an affect on my carbon footprint for how simple of a solution there could be. If you think about it, if you do not compost or recycle, that waste is being hauled off in a truck which is releasing even more CO2 in transportation and then being put in a landfill which will take decades to decompose and it costs you, your school, or town, a certain amount of money each trip. This just simply is not efficient at all. Now a simple solution to this would be to just simply throw your recyclables in the recycling bin and take your compostable scraps to a local transfer station that has a composting pile. This could cut down on your carbon footprint and save you, your school, or your town some money.