Know Your Foot Print
While driving to work this morning, I noticed that I now have a 'trash bag' in my car. 10 years ago, I did not have one. My car is not the primary family car neither do I eat in my car other than a granola bar. I still land up generating enough trash per week to change my trash bag once a week. That was not the most comforting feeling that in the ~3 hours every weekday that I spend in the car (=15 Hours), I generate an entire bag of trash which is outside my daily normal activity of lunch, diner, breakfast, etc.This made me realize if I multiplied this with just my household or my whole family and beyond, we have a potentially disturbing statistic.
"Know Your Carbon Footprint" has been a recent marketing tool along the same lines as "Green Thinking". It does not genuinely mean or promise to do anything in most cases - it just plan perception marketing. If you tangibly applied this to your everyday life, what do you think would be the result.
Here's an exercise I plan to follow one of these days. I want to know on a daily/weekly basis (which will be my denominator)
- How much water I use
- How much trash - I - as an individual generate.
- How much noise I create.
- How much I drive in my car and utilize resources and pollute the environment
- How much time I spend on the Internet
- How much electricity I use (lights, microwave, dishwasher, washer, drier, fans, a/c, humidifiers, electronic toothbrushes, etc).
- How much do I eat
- How much do I drink
- How much do I waste that could have been utilized
- How much time I spend doing nothing
- How much I talk on the phone
- How many things I need on a daily basis from the minute I get up.
- How many things I am heavily dependant on
- How many things I am dependant on that I have no control over
- How many things (and what kind) depend on me
Now my numerator:
- How much do I give back to nature
- How much do I recycle
- How much do I save directly
- How much did I save indirectly
- Did I enable saving / consuming less in anyway or with anything / anyone
- What did I not / stop use today that I used yesterday What can I do without
- How did I help the environment
- How often did I think about the environment before I did anything
- Did I achieve anything tangible that was either helpful to me or someone else by consuming what I did today
- Is what I consume sustainable
- Is what I trash recyclable
I bet I give back less than 1% of what I consume. Being aware of what you leave behind makes you do a lot of things differently.
Anyone want to join me on this one? Here's a rudimentary carbon footprint calculator to get you started: http://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx
Labels: Caron Footprint, Consumption, Energy, Recycling
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posted by Janak Joshi @ 6/24/2009 03:10:00 PM
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