April 13th, 2009 @ 5:41 pm
No, not your actual FOOT-print. But your carbon footprint. I don’t know about you but I keep hearing people talking about carbon footprints – mostly referring to businesses and celebrities trying to be “carbon neutral.” Then a co-worker sent me a link to calculate your own household’s footprint. Cool!
The link is a companion to the Low Carbon Diet Workbook – a fascinating book that helps you find easy ways to reduce your household carbon emissions. Here’s a description of the book from the website:
This “30 Day Program to Lose 5000 Pounds” is a fun, accessible, easy to use guide that will show you, step-by-step, how to dramatically reduce your CO2 output in just a month’s time.
So they also have a calculator for you to figure out your household’s emissions – it’s easy and quick (just grab your last electric and heating bills so you know what you use per year).
I was very curious. We have a family of 4 living in a 2200 s.f. house that has been renovated so it should mostly be efficient. We have low flow toilets, a new/efficient dishwasher and a front-loading efficient washing machine. But we also have 2 boys who leave lights on all the time (grrr), we do have air conditioning and I run a business largely out of the house. We have one mini-van (bad gas mileage – around 19) and a Prius (that we use whenever possible). We also don’t take airplane trips (except for work which I didn’t calculate in).
So all in all I had no idea where we were going to come out in all of this. I was very happy to see that we did come in at just under 46000 lb – about 9000 lb below US average. Sounds good, right? Well – then I looked and saw that Germany’s average is 27700 lb per household, and Sweden’s is 14600 lb. It looks like we could make some major improvements still!
Check it out and see what you come up with:
Let me know if you do it – it would be great to see people post their results!
Gwen Brady
said,
June 28, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Hey Kristin. I meant to tell you this a while ago…I went to the website an was appalled at how big our footprint is despite what I thought were best efforts. Bought the book and we're making slow but steady progress. Just found out that our oil company has a bioheat option, which is a mix of biodiesel and regular heating oil – yay since that's our #1 contributor. Hope all's well!