Calculating Your Personal Carbon Footprint
Remember, your individual carbon footprint is calculated by considering the following types of activities:
- How many miles you drive in a year
- What kind of car you drive
- The heating source for your home
- How much electricity you use in a year
- Amount of non-repurposable waste
Calculate Your Carbon Footprint
Use this easy calculator to determine your carbon footprint, then read on for some easy ways to reduce your overall environmental impact.
Ways to Reduce Your Personal Carbon Footprint
Now that you’ve determined your personal carbon footprint, here are a few ways to reduce it.
Reducing Automobile Emissions
Driving habits like accelerating smoothly (and slowly!), driving the speed limit, maintaining a steady speed and keeping proper tire pressure can not only increase your average miles per gallon, they could help you save more than a ton of CO2 per year! It’s also important to keep your car maintained and replace all air, oil and fuel filters according to the manufacturer’s recommended schedule.
Reducing Air Travel Emissions
When booking air travel, seek out non-stop flights whenever possible. Planes produce around 244 pounds of CO2 for each mile of travel. The average plane carries 218 people, so that’s just over 1 pound of CO2 per person, per mile! A round-trip flight from Chicago to Dallas is 1,602 miles. In fact, scientists once predicted that aircraft emissions would become one of the largest contributors to global warming by 2050.
How to Make Your Home Eco-friendly
There are many simple swaps you can make at home to reduce your personal carbon footprint. The bonus is that many of these practices either directly or indirectly save you money!
- A programmable thermostat is around $50 and can save you about that much in just the first year.
- Caulking around leaky window frames and other areas where heating and cooling can escape from your house decreases energy usage.
- Compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) use 1/3 of the energy of regular light bulbs.
- ENERGY STAR appliances and utilities are specifically designed to reduce your overall consumption, indirectly reducing your carbon output.
- When it comes to appliances, bigger isn’t necessarily better if you aren’t efficiently using all the space in your refrigerator or oven.
Looking for an eco-friendly power source? Consider renewable sources like compressed natural gas (CNG). It’s just one of the many ways that Renergy is helping our partners reduce their carbon footprints.
Photo credit: Veniamin Kraskov / Shutterstock.com