My final carbon footprint reduction entry

At the beginning of the school quarter, I recorded my current ecological footprint and how many planets we would go through if the whole population lived like I did. During this quarter, I created four way to help reduce my footprint. My four goals were:

1. Start a recycling program

2. Lower my energy bills

3. Eat less packaged food/ less meats

4. Reduce the amount of paper plate I use

Now let me review how I did. I am most proud of my first goal. I started a mini recycling program in my house. Before this quarter, nobody in our house recycled. I now have two large empty boxes set up, and I have also convinced everybody in my house to use these boxes for their recycling. It has been very successful and I will continue to 'force' everybody in my house to recycle. For my second goal, lower my energy usage, I did not really see that much of a difference. Every month has been about the same as it was last year. I did my part of unplugging all electrical devices that I did not use on a daily basis. I just feel that since I have three other roommates, and that half of our house is heated by electricity, its hard to see if I made any difference. I will continue to unplug devices that I am not using in hopes that I am personally using less energy. For my third goal, I feel okay about it. I could have definitely done a better job, but I did try and eat more local foods when I could. It is also hard for me to cut out so much meat on my diet, and I have a hard time believing that I will stick with this diet going forward. I just LOVE steaks! Finally, I did a pretty good job at reaching my last goal. I did use a lot less paper plates, and did a lot more cleaning of the dishes this year. It was not too bad, and I will have a pretty easy time keeping up with this trend in the future. 

I would now like to compare my two footprint calculated results.

My First Calculation

My Second Calculation 

 

So comparing both of these tables, it is clear that I did reduce my footprint a great deal. I would like to mention I think my first test was a little miss leading because I did the meat consumption wrong the first time and said I ate way meat products than I actually did. So the difference is not as much as the chart makes it seem, but I did have significant changes in other categories. This is a very small sample size, but I will continue to do all that I can to help reduce my footprint.