There are many simple things you can do to reduce your ecological footprint. Learn how to reduce your footprint in each consumption category - transportation, housing, food and goods.
To discover your own biggest areas of resource consumption and compare your own footprint to others', check out our roundup of the best ecological footprint calculators. Find more water-saving tips here. Saving is advance is always better than paying afterwards, but for the carbon emissions you can't eliminate, sometimes you have the option to purchase carbon offsets.
Individuals, companies, or governments purchase carbon offsets to mitigate their own greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, electricity use, and other sources. For example, an individual might purchase carbon offsets to compensate for the greenhouse gas emissions caused by personal air travel.
One example is Atmosfair , that uses an emissions calculator to figure out how much greenhouse gas emissions are caused by individual flights and offers carbon offsets. Offsets are typically achieved through financial support of projects that reduce the emission of greenhouse gases in the short- or long-term. The most common type of project is renewable energy, such as wind farms, biomass energy, or hydroelectric dams. Others include energy efficiency projects, the destruction of industrial pollutants or agricultural byproducts, destruction of landfill methane, and forestry projects.
There is some debate around the efficacy of carbon offset projects, so feel free to read about it here and make up your own mind. This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
What code is in the image? Use Cleaner Transportation Don't drive when there is an alternative! Walk, bike, or take public transport whenever possible. Grass is a huge CO2 sink.
Buy grass fed. Broccoli will use more land and give you less nutrition. Hooved animals walked this earth in large numbers before humans concentrated them in fences and farms. After beef, which is 1, soy is the second largest cause of deforestation.
I am a vegan and have solved the problem of soy and palm oil. Solution could be to stop over eating, veg or meat and stop wasting food. I think food industry should also be penalized. One of the culprits in my opinion are supermarkets.
They buy cheap and more and waste a lot as their pricing takes wasting into account. Local govt should monitor and penalize if they waste food items and simultaneously reduce the expiry date of the food items, this will deter industry to mass produce anything edible.
These are scalable and I believe would be very effective. Packaging is also a problem. A ml bottle for wine weighs gm — very inefficient. Lots of energy wasted even if recycled. Ban wine, beer, drinks in glass bottles?
But I of course realize that not everyone has this experience. We as the agricultural industry raise cattle for dairy and meat products AND we grow the crops necessary for people who choose to be either vegan or vegetarian.
I would also like to say that I am slightly disappointed in an institution like Columbia University for blaming climate change on cattle burping methane into the atmosphere.
Cows do burp methane into the atmosphere, this is true, but what people always seem to forget is that this is a part of the natural carbon cycle. These cattle have been doing this since the beginning of ranching methods and before that, the hundreds of thousands of Bison that used to roam the great plains did the same thing. We cannot blame cattle for doing what they are designed to do. Anyway, sorry for rambling on, hope that this possibly helped someone.
Acarnes, this is really poor logic. But we have There is nothing natural about industrial agriculture, and quantity of the GHG source is more important than whether or not it existed in some capacity pre-industrialization.
As someone mentioned above, it takes 12 lbs of grain to make 1 lb of beef not to mention water! If more people move to substitute more plants for beef, you can feed the same amount of people with less cows, as that 12 lbs of grain can feed more people than 1 lb of beef.
This clearly reduces carbon footprint, as it reduces overall consumption and agricultural production per person. It takes much less land to feed people directly with plant food than it would to grow the food to feed the animals with which to feed those people. If we all are a vegetarian or vegan diet we would need less land and more could be left as wild forest to absorb and store carbon. Hey Patric, I just think that your forgetting that we use a large areas to grow crops to then feed live stock, much more then it would take to feed the human population.
Also cows produce methane. Hi Patric, I definitely see what you are saying with regards to Soy production. Indonesian and Malaysian Rainforest are cut down for both palm oil and soy production. This means that beef and dairy production are the huge contributors to climate change as they also include a vast proportion of the requirement for soy.
Lancet studies in England put out a study. We cannot save the planet unless we stop herding beef. The study showed less beef and less lamb on the plates of the world to save the planet. Also think of all the heart surgery from grease in our blood vessels these days. Less beef, then less colon cancer too, better health. Eating red meat has been proved to be hazardous to human health. Lobbyists deny the truth. Big meat is full of toxic material in the animal fat, and big fish too.
The meat eaters make vegans pay for their medical bills, which are enormous. Japanese eat dolphin which is loaded with mercury. It took million years to create the rain forest in Brazil. They should grow river turtles, not cattle, if they want meat in the Amazon.
It takes 1, gallons of water to make a pound of beef meat. Why not just live clean? Lots of good nuts and apples to harvest. Tropical people are happy with bananas and peas, pineapple and all that juicy variety. They hardly eat the meat they grow on the fields they have created from destroyed forests. Rice is almost the divine of foods, with ginger and turmeric. Some beans and squash keep the soil good, and healthy soil grows all kinds of fruits and trees.
We need good soil. Cows eat too much before slaughter. People can eat sea urchins that overpopulate the shores. People could fish them with a knife. Pig farms will have to close too. All that pollution and putrid decayed matter pigs produce will at last be gone. Farms were once sacred to nature. Soil was fertile, and so plentiful was food. The world was an Eden which will return. Nature has always favored that which really sustains her. Too many meat eaters eat too much of it.
Almost all of it … via the large industrial cow farms. Patric, I agree with you at a certain point: Brazil, has and keeps the world largest green are. It is the only country in the world that does somethong to keep his green area. I know about it, I lived 20 years in South America and I know how tough they are regarding keeping their green amazon. I used to work for the government, I used to work with territory planning and development of sustainable activities such as economics based o local vocation and load capacity of the environment.
Hello there! Terrific points about energy conservation and carbon footprint reductions. Props to the author s! I happen to run a blog devoted to renewables and energy efficiency and thought one of my articles about energy audit tools might be useful to your readers if you incorporate it in this article.
Either way, keep up the important work of spreading a word about environmentally friendly lifestyle. Lots of options. No doubt you and others can think of even more options.
A lot can be accomplished through thoughtful choices. I know people who keep the heat at 80 and wear a T-shirt around inside when its 20 degrees out. Can you say more about how using reusable bags reduces the carbon footprint please? A plastic bag is equal to about 1 drop of crude oil. Bags are litter but driving is much worse for carbon footprint.
Thanks a lot for the tips.. Finally an article that actually lays out what each of us can do. Ecological Footprint: The impact of a person or community on the environment, expressed as the amount of land required to sustain their use of natural resources.
Luckily, you can start creating these habits today! Then, incorporate these suggestions to reduce your ecological footprint and make a positive impact! Have more tips to reduce your ecological footprint? Share them with us on Facebook , Twitter , and Instagram! We use disposable plastic shopping bags for an average of 12 minutes before we discard them and yes, there are still plastic shopping bags at clothing stores, hardware stores, and more.
Make the switch to reusable items, such as reusable water bottle, reusable shopping bag, and reusable cups. The best step is to start refusing plastic as much as you can every day. Switch to Renewable Energy. According to the EPA , the energy sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US. The more we recycle, the fewer raw materials and resources need to be harvested for new products. Private companies can recycle substantially more than government operations, including electronic and landscape waste.
To start recycling at your home or business today, contact LRS for recycling and waste removal. Want to learn more about Lakeshore Recycling Systems? Do you live in the below areas and are you ready to pay your bill?
Click Here. For all other Customers incluing roll-off, Pit Stop, Clean Sweep, commercial and multi-family accounts that wish to pay their bill:. Are you a City of Wheaton Customer and ready to pay your bill?
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