I Dress Myself

How big is yours

I've been looking at my carbon footprint using a really useful calculator at myfootprint.org. Apparently the average person in the UK has a carbon footprint of 48.1 gha (global hectares), which (if everyone had a footprint this size) would require 3 earths to sustain. Even scarier, the average person from the US would need 5.3 earths to sustain their lifestyle! Me and Pete are pretty good on most counts and came up with a carbon footprint of 17.5 gha, but this would still require 1.1 earths. And really, considering that third world countries need to undergo quite a bit of (carbon creating) development to lift them out of poverty, we should each be aiming quite a bit lower than 1 earth to compensate.

Thankfully the website gives lots of ideas for reducing your carbon footprint and we went back through the calculator making a few changes to reduce ours. We didn't use our car much anyway and have decided to sell it and use bikes and public transport more. We're changing our energy provider to Ecotricity so that we only use energy from renewable sources, and we're getting a composter from the council (our old home-made one died). Nothing too painful and this reduces the Conway family footprint to 0.8 earth each.

Have a look at yours and see what you can do.

Posted in Ethics and Environment by Hannah on Tuesday 22 July 2008