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 >
Carbon Family Footprint
I had absolutely no clue how much carbon I was emitting just through home appliances and such. It was more than twice the average for my state, which was absolutely incredible. I apparently have a large quantity of light bulbs in my house because this comprised the majority of where that carbon was being emitted from. I had a much smaller food and purchase carbon amount than the average, however, and about the same amount being emitted through transportation. Removing light bulbs may be the way to decrease all of this, seeing as how my carbon emissions for everything else are fairly normal.
One way that you could help reduce your carbon footprint is to make sure that you have efficient light bulbs. different types of lights use different amounts of energy. You would want to avoid incandescent lights because they waste a lot of energy. This happens because energy is wasted on heating up a incandescent light, which is not helpful in creating light. You'll want to opt for CFLs or LEDs because they are much more energy efficient. Another thing you can do to help reduce your footprint is to make sure you're not leaving the lights on when they aren't being used. Make a point to turn off the lights when you leave the room and don't leave any lights on all through the night.
My dad always make sure to turn off any of the lights off in our house. We also have a lot of lights in our house and my carbon footprint was kind of high.
In my family we always turn off the lights before leaving the room or the house. Plus make sure no lights are left on before you go to bed. This can help reduce your carbon footprint and save energy.
My family has begun to make sure all the lights are off when leaving a room, using our own reusable waterbottles, and use public transportaion as well as carpool in order to reduce our family's carbon footprint.
My family has multiple extension cords and we unplugs those when we don't use them because if you turn it off with the switch on there it will not do any thing and will still end up consuming all that energy causing a bigger carbon foot print, so make sure you unplug your extension cords from the walls.
In my family something that has made a huge impact on lowering our carbon footprint is using LED lightbulbs. After doing the online calculations, I compared my data to my peers and we gathered that my home carbon footprint was much lower than their carbon footprint due to the efficient bulbs that we have throughout our house.