Tuesday 20 September 2011

Carbon Footprint, What Is It?

A carbon footprint is basically how much Co2 (carbon) you pollutate this plant with, the lower it is the better for both your walletand our environment.

The majority of people know about what a carbon footprint is but fail to know how big theirs is. Your carbon footprint takes many things into account things like how often you go to the doctors, to what you eat and how much you travel.

The following is a breakdown of my footprint:

Services (healthcare, education, legal stuff, construction etc.) = 3.3
Food = 1.6
Stuff (buying things: clothes, games, dvds etc.) = 1.1
Home Electricity = 4.9
Public Transport = 0.4
Water & Sewage = 0.3

This comes to a total of 11.6 tonnes of Co2 a year. Some of the things on the list are hard to change for example the services and water & sewage would be seen as necessary. Where as food could be lowered to 0.8 if I cut all red meat, poultry and dairy from my diet (basically a vegan diet but foods like fish and honey are allowed).

Things I could live without are things like public transport, meat and dairy and I suppose I don’t really need as much games and dvds.

The averages are:
  • US = 30 tonnes
  • UK = 15.4 tonnes
  • China = 4.5 tonnes
  • Bangladesh = 1 tonnes

Since I live in the UK I inject 3.8 less tonnes of Co2 than the average person living in the United Kingdom. However this simply because I don’t fly which is the single most destructive thing that you can do to the environment.

Shocking isn’t it, the average person in America uses 30 tonnes of Co2 a year, no wonder global warming is getting worse and whole species of animals are just getting wiped out. If we do not do something about our own carbon footprint that we will extinct ourselves from this beautiful plant via greed and selfishness. 

Carbon footprint and breakdown source: http://my.1010uk.org/

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