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 >
My Family Footprint
After doing the carbon footprint assignment, I found that my family's carbon footprint was a lot larger than most. It showed that my footprint of CO2 per year is 13,729kgs, which is a lot more than the average (which is 9,727kgs). I found that my transportation used 4,248kgs (the average is 2,557kgs), my home used 5,156kgs (the average is 3,727kgs), my food used 3,900kgs, (the average is 2,223), and my purchases used 426 (the average is 1,191). The only thing that was less than the average was my purchases. Everything else was at least 1,500kgs over the average. One of the main things that has contributed to my large carbon footprint is the amount of lights used in my house and the fact that many of them are incandescent bulbs (they have a large mercury footprint that isn't good for the environment). Along with this, the amount of driving that I do each week has greatly impacted my carbon footprint size. According to NASA, Driving uses energy and burns earth's pet roleum (large effect on global warming). Overall, I think by reducing these two things I would decrease my carbon footprint drastically and would be much better for the environment.