Calculation of Footprint: 12.9
Comparison of Footprint to Others
I notice that my footprint is a lot larger than my peers, and I believe this is mainly because of the amount of sports I do weekly and the living space required for the actvities outside of my own home. An example of this is how my barn is on approximately 40,000 square meters, on top of my 1800 sqm house and the school where I spend most of my time. Some areas where my footprint was lower than others was in my water use area (I do not take baths and my showers are only about 5 minutes each), as well as how much money I spend daily (not that much as I tend to spend a lot in later quantities at once).
Things That Increase My Footprint
- Showering very often for a long duration of time
- Eating foods or using products that contain high amounts of plastic content
- Taking private vehicles every day to a work or school environment
- Buying new clothes every time you need a new wardrobe in comparison to up cycling and second hand materials
- Eating more meat
- Participating in activities and sports that are indoor or have facilities that require large buildings or parking lots
- Not composting organics or recycling suitable products
- Buying food that was not grown in BC or locally
- Leaving taps and hoses on for unnecessary reasons
- Wearing matching socks
Of these ten detrimental environmental impacts, I have chosen 5 that I have attempted to change to maintain a friendlier ecological footprint. I have started to take the bus more to school in the mornings, regardless of the fact that my parents are available to drive me or not. I chose this mainly because pollution and gasoline is a large contributing factor to the amount of carbon monoxide in the air and how unchangeable this problem may become in our future. When I am buying groceries by myself or with my mum I encourage her to buy things more locally grown and support farmers and growers in BC. One of the largest steps I have made as a person in my life to help myself be nicer to the environment is me going vegetarian in 2013. The livestock industry contributes more greenhouse gas emissions globally than the transport sector and the ecological footprint of vegetarians is estimated to be around half that of meat eaters. The last thing I tried to better for myself is wearing second hand clothes because I find myself throwing out a lot of my own clothes because I was unaware of how to up cycle them properly. I chose these things to work on because I knew they would be accomplishable for me and I would not drop the ball or forget about them because I knew I would enjoy helping the earth and attempting to make an impact.
The hardest change I had to make throughout this experience was wearing more second hand clothing. This is because I really enjoy shopping for new clothes and being able to do that dwindled the more I wore other peoples clothes instead of buying. My mum and I have created a system where at the end of each month we go through all the clothes we no longer wear and send them to value village, and shop for more clothes for ourselves while we are there. Giving up meat was not considered a large or challenging change for me because animals are very important to me and it made me uncomfortable to eat them in the first place, and I knew giving up the ability to do that would also help towards greenhouse gasses and the negative effects of farming. This change would probably be the easiest one for me to make because I also recognized how it would change my life and how much I wished to impact the people around me. I continue to tell people how positive going vegetarian can be for someone and how helpful it can be, because I believe things cannot be spread without people advocating their opinions about them. An obstacle I encountered while trying to drive to school less and use the bus more was the contradicting times with my schedule. I have to take 2 and sometimes 3 buses to school each day and they don’t always line up, leaving me waiting for up to 30 minutes in the morning. Since it also takes longer to get to school using public transit, I had to wake up earlier in my day which also proved challenging since I enjoy sleeping quite a bit. The way I solved this problem was going to sleep earlier at night and setting more than one alarm to insure I actually woke up instead of sleeping through them all. The steps I will and continue to take in my future include staying vegetarian for as long as my other medical dietary restrictions allow me to, create and organize systems to up cycle clothing and not buy things I do not need, buy local groceries when I move out for myself (when I have more control on what I can spend my personal money on) and continue to maintain a better sleep schedule so I can take public transit more instead of relying on my parents.
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