My Ecological Footprint

My ecological footprint was 10.80 hectares

The average ecological footprint in North America is 8.70 hectares

Classmates  footprints

  • Ben – 7.9
  • Collin – 11.3
  • Bana – 8.7
  • Dylan – 12.45
  • Ronan – 8.65
  • Kavyan – 7.45

From What I found, I was in the higher half of the footprints I found. After finding out what my classmate’s footprints were, I calculated the average footprint between them. The average footprint between my classmates was 9.40 meaning I was 1.40 hectares above average. Hopefully, in the future, I’ll be able to lower my score to help save the planet.

 

Ten Actions That Increase The Size Of My Footprint or That I Can Lower;

  • If your shower is usually 3-6 minutes + 60
  • If you flush the toilet every time +30
  • If your family usually waters the garden every 2nd week you get + 30
  • If some of your clothes were bought new for you, or by you +100
  • If you hardly wear 1/4 or less of your clothes you own + 10
  • If all your garbage on a typical day would fit into a basket +90
  • If you always turn off the lights and other electrical appliances when you leave a room -20 – 1/2 = -10
  • If you spend some of your time of the day on public transport +30
  • If you grow a lot of your own food -10 – 1/2 = -5
  •  If you usually throw out 1/4 of your food or less +15

 

Five Actions I Can Take To Lower My Ecological Footprint and How;

  • If your shower is usually 3-6 minutes + 60

This is definitely one that I can want to improve. I often like to take my time with my showers and lean towards 4-6 minute showers. Although if I use my time well in the shower then I can lower the time to 2-3 minutes and still come out squeaky clean! This would bring my score down by 0.20.

  • If you flush the toilet every time +30

This is definitely something that won’t be easy for me, as I am the type of person who always flushes the toilet. I personally think it’s good hygiene but for the sake of the planet, I can make this simple yet effective change bringing my score down by 0.15.

  • If all your garbage on a typical day would fit into a basket +90

I end up using a lot of single-use plastics that aren’t good for the environment. For example, I eat food items such as granola bars or Welches Gummies on an almost regular basis. I don’t need to eat these foods, and not eating them as often as I do would cause less single-use plastics to be consumed and dealt with via the garbage can. This would allow me to fit all the garbage on a “typical day” to fit into a shoebox bringing my score down by 0.20.

  • If you always turn off the lights and other electrical appliances when you leave a room -20 – 1/2 = -10

I can try my best to do this as much as possible. There are some posing challenges to this task, e.g. If I’m in a room with other people and then I leave I obviously won’t turn off all the electronics and electronic appliances. Another challenge with this is if I leave a room for a short amount of time such as turning my shower on then going to my room to get clothes for when I’m done. I originally put -10 for this because I remember to turn off the lights 80% of the time. Hopefully, I will be able to bring this down to -20 by always remembering and misusing 0.10 from my score.

  • If you grow a lot of your own food -10 – 1/2 = -5

I gave myself a -5 for this because I do grow a lot of food for myself and my family in my back yard during the summer. Unfortunately, it is Fall right now and I don’t have any food plants that grow during the fall. In the future, I plan on growing more food plants and having some that can be sustained during the fall and possibly winter as well bringing my ecological footprint down 0.05.

 

Changes that were easy to make;

I found taking shorter showers was easy as I used to take short showers quite often. Along with that on a semi-unrelated note I started taking colder showers (still warm, but colder), which I think might in-return help with lower my footprint. Another change that was easy to make was not flushing the toilet every time. Although I didn’t always not flush after going to the washroom there were some exceptions. If I knew someone was going to go to the washroom after me then I told them I was not flushing to save water (I didn’t tell them it was for this project because I would have to explain many times in-depth).

 

Changes that were hard if not impossible to make;

I’ll start with the impossible task(s), growing my own food. Within two weeks its nearly-if-not impossible to plant a seed and have it grow into full, ready to eat foods. Another reason this task was not possible for me to do was because I didn’t have any plants that bear food in the fall making it also impossible to do this. A change that was hard to do was the garbage task, as an individual, I could’ve done it easily, but in a family of 5, it was a bit harder than anticipated.

 

Obstacles;

Family, my family posed a big obstacle in the tasks at hand. My family didn’t appreciate me not flushing the toilet because it left stains on the bowl where the water level was, secondly with this my sister usually is in charge of cleaning the toilets so she didn’t like that. Another obstacle with them was garbage. My family uses a lot of single-use plastics but we try not to. As a family of 5, we can make a lot of garbage, and that was one of my biggest obstacles.

 

Future Steps;

In the future, I plan to bring my ecological footprint down. By doing these 5 steps my ecological footprint has already gone down 0.80 hectares! That’s more than the size of a Football field! I will continue to turn off appliances when I’m not using them and take shorter showers. After doing this project I have realized that if everyone just took 5 simple tasks to lower their ecological footprint then we could bring the overall ecological footprint down by so much. If 7,500,000 people participated to bring their footprints down by 0.05 hectares then we could bring down the overall ecological footprint of the world by 375,000! In conclusion, I will keep trying to do my part as a Human being to bring down my own Ecological Footprint and help the health of the earth.

-Justin C

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