As per the request of one of my teachers I measured my ecological footprint.
My footprint was 7.11 hectares, and you can check to see exactly how here.
My footprint was on the lower end but not the smallest amongst a few of my friends. It was also quite high by my thoughts at least.
Simran 9.35
Colby 9.05
Ruby 8.10
Mel 6.95
Hailey 10.6
Devon 6.75
Ten actions that currently are making it worse:
- Long showers
- All new clothing
- Not wearing all of my clothes
- Still quite a bit of garbage
- Used to have quite a bit of transportation in my daily schedule
- Lots of electronic time (unavoidable)
- Eat lots of inorganic foods
- Mid-sized vehicle
- Lots of dairy in my diet
- Lots of inorganic meats
Some things I can do to fix some of these problems:
- Reduce shower length
- Work to buy more clothes second hand or get from family
- Wear a wider variety of clothes or work to buy less in the future
- Try even harder to reduce my daily garbage output
- Attempt to incorporate more organic products into my diet
- Maybe have a little less dairy in my diet or change to alternatives
In these next weeks or into the future I will attempt to do most of the six things I mentioned above. In the next little while, I will take shorter showers, wear more of my clothes, reduce my garbage, and eat more organically, especially regarding meats. As well, in the future, I will work to only buy clothes I am sure I will use, possibly second-hand.
Some changes that were an easy switch were showers, clothing, and food. As soon as I recognized that I took so long in the showers, I was able to be efficient and finish in less time than I did before. I also wore a wider variety of my clothes so that all of them got used before washes and got their most usefulness. However, this doesn’t mean that I still didn’t wear the same clothes a few times a week. Finally, I simply asked my parents when they were shopping to buy more organic. Simple as that. I also cooked a few of these new products myself, and I do think they taste different.
One thing that I can’t change right now is about buying my clothes. Since I can’t change that currently, I can’t say anything about it. However, I plan to buy more clothes second-hand and less overall. I see that I have quite a few outfits that just sit at the bottom of my drawer, and I plan to stop that from happening.
The most challenging thing that I had to do was cutting my garbage output. I pride myself on trying to minimize my garbage as much as possible. However, there was still room to improve. The thing about that area to improve was that I couldn’t help some of it. For example, packaging. I usually ask for anything that could be bought in bulk to be. Though, this point in time isn’t really conducive to that, and most things are now only sold pre-packaged. I was actually unable to fix this problem over my attempt of a few weeks.
In the future, I plan to continue with at least most of the things that I have already changed. As well, I mentioned earlier about something that I will already attempt when buying clothes once more. This little experiment wasn’t hard and it yielded many good results, so I see this as an absolute win.