Carpooling

Say you live 15 miles away from work. You work 245 days a year. 1 miles is about 1 lb of carbon emissions. You live in a situation where you emit 7350 lbs of CO2 a year from emissions. If you carpool with 1 other person, you now have halved your emissions.  3675 lbs of CO2 in comparison to the 7350 lbs you used to emit. Congratulations!

The way to calculate how many lbs of CO2  emissions you prevent

(Miles to work x 2 x days you work a year) – (miles to work x 2 x days you work a year ÷ the number of people you carpool with)

 

Vegetarianism and Food Waste

This chart shows foods and the amounts of greenhouse gases they produce

The chart was from :
http://www.greeneatz.com/foods-carbon-footprint.html

I am going to start doing “Meatless Monday” and eating lentils more. Why lentils? Look at the chart. Lentils, and the greenhouses gases given off through the process of shipping and cooking etc. is more than 27 times less than beef. EAT LENTILS!

If you want to eat meat, the best option for the environment is chicken. Why? Look at the chart again. Of all the meats, chicken gives off the least greenhouse gases. (Not so) Fun fact: 40% of America’s food gets thrown away.

Saving Energy Washing

An easy and efficient way to save energy is washing clothes in cold water. It can save 1600 pounds of CO2 a year per household. It also saves money, you save $0.64 per load, that adds up pretty quickly. My family also dries some of our clothes on a foldable drying rack, which also saves energy.

LED lightbulbs

I did some reasearch and saw . . .

• 1 LED lightbulb last as long as 40-50 incandescent lightbulbs
• If you change 25 lightbulbs to LED you save about $6.65 k per 50k hrs of use
• If my family changed 18 lightbulbs to LED we would lower our carbon footprint by 600 lbs of CO2 a year (that is equal to the emissions given off by 30 gallons of gas)

First step

First I calculated my carbon footprint. I used https://www3.epa.gov/carbon-footprint-calculator/ , but you can use any site you want. I saw that my family created less waste because of our car, because we have a hybrid. Even though we has a smaller carbon footprint that the average US citizen, we had a carbon footprint three times as large as the average person in the world. Another nice thing above it this site, is that you can see what actions you can do, and the impact they will have on your carbon footprint