Many students using our footprint calculator said that they could not pledge to reduce their home footprints because they were not making the decisions for the household. Here is your chance to design your own sustainable virtual household!
If you had your own home, what would you do to make it more energy efficient? Where would you get your electricity from? Where would your house be? Would you live near to your school or work or local transit options? Where would you get your food from?
MY Family Footprint >
Improving our family footprint
My family has an average to high footprint. Some of the things that probably increase our foot print as a whole is traveling far around 3 times a year to visit family (plus vacations), rarely buying locally grown food, and the fact that our house uses gas energy. Some of these things I cannot change but there are a lot of small things my family and I can do together to help reduce our foot print. We can help remind each other to turn off lights and fans when we leave a room. We can focus on taking shorter showers and using less water. We can also agree to unplug electronics when they are not in use. We can change some of the light bulbs to more energy efficient ones. We can visit the local farmers market together occasionally to buy locally grown food. Finally, we can also partake in a larger project as a family such as, planting a garden together or composting. Some of these ideas I got from this website: http://cotap.org/reduce-carbon-footprint/ and some of them I came up with on my own. Any family can do these small tasks and more to help reduce their footprint so everybody should encourage their family to participate.