My footprint(energy saving)?

Question

I just did a footprint calculator and I found out that my household of 3 people is 51. Is that good or bad are there more ways to reduce it?

Answer 1

Don't believe anyone. Leaving a foot print is the only way anyone will ever know you existed. That being said...........there is no such thing as a carbon foot print. Its just a marketing scam for Algore inc. and his cigar smoking fat cats. Use less energy because it saves you money, not for any other reason. Go Green! (money)

Answer 2

There is no such thing as a good footprint, you can always reduce it. Here are some ways to reduce your footprint.

These are from seventeen.com

Ways to go green

Unplug your power. Ten percent of the electricity used in your home is burned by communication devices and appliances when they are turned off! If every U.S. household just unplugged their computers and cell phone chargers when they were not being used, collectively we'd save over $100 million — enough to provide free health care to every low-income child under the age of five in the state of California.

If you can, send a text message or e-mail from a handheld device or cell phone, instead of from a computer, especially for quick, one-line notes. You’ll save yourself time and conserve energy. Compared to sending a text message, e-mailing and instant messaging from a computer uses more than 30 times the electricity per message.

Use both sides of your plain paper, and recycle. Paper is the biggest form of waste that comes from schools. Every ton, or 220,000 sheets, of paper that is recycled saves approximately 17 trees. The average school tosses 38 tons of paper per year, or more than 8 million sheets!

Buy clothes made from organic cotton. The purchase of one T-shirt and a pair of jeans made from 100 percent organic cotton eliminates at least 150 grams of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides from the environment. If one out of every five Americans purchased a 100 percent organic T-shirt instead of one made from conventionally grown U.S. cotton, nearly 50,000 tons of agrochemicals would be prevented from polluting U.S. freshwater bodies, ecosystems, and wardrobes.

17 Tip: To really stay green, wash your organic threads in Arm & Hammer's Essential laundry detergent. It's the first detergent made of 100% plant-based soaps, and its concentrated formula and packaging make it more sensible for the environment.

Gift cards, concert tickets, restaurant certificates, and movie vouchers can be great alternatives to heavily packaged and wrapped holiday presents. If you buy these items online, you'll not only save between five and 10 pounds of packaging waste, but you'll also reduce the time, stress, and energy associated with traffic, crowds, and long check-out lines. If 50 percent of households replaced just two packaged presents with gifts that could slide inside an envelope, 50 million pounds or more of waste could be saved.

If you're planning to buy a new computer, consider getting a laptop or notebook instead of a desktop. Laptops require less materials and energy to produce than desktops and use a fraction of the electricity to run. If you choose a laptop over a desktop, you'll save an average of 220 kilowatt hours per year and about $20 on your annual electricity bill. If one in 23 households made their next computer purchase a laptop instead of a desktop, the energy saved could keep the lights on for every household in Silicon Valley.

Try to limit the frequency with which you replace your cell phone, and make sure you e-cycle (dispose of it through an electronic waste-management company) or donate your old one. If you keep each mobile phone you buy for three years instead of just 18 months, you'll effectively cut the resources needed to make a new one. If just 10 percent of cell phone users kept their next phone for three years before replacing it, an average of 5.2 million phones could be saved from disposal each year.

Instead of buying a disposable plastic bottle of water every time you go to the gym, consider bringing your own reusable water bottle filled with filtered water from home. You could save an average of $200 per year, as well as 14 pounds of plastic. If one in 20 gym members who generally buy a bottle of water before each workout brought a reusable water bottle from home, the total plastic saved annually would total nearly 29 million pounds, a weight that would take 200,000 people each bench-pressing 150 pounds to lift.

Buy a quality razor with refillable blades. Disposable plastic razors are neither recyclable nor biodegradable, and they take significantly more energy to produce. If for the next year you replaced your purchases of disposable razors with refill cartridges, the amount of energy saved by not manufacturing the extra plastic could brew you five pots of coffee. If half of the disposable razors sold per year were replaced with refills, the energy saved could fly 26,000 San Diego java lovers to pick their own Kona coffee on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Try to do your cardio workouts on equipment that doesn't require an external power supply. Choose, for example, a stationary bike or elliptical machine over a treadmill or stair-stepper. For a 40-minute workout, you could save 0.8 kilowatt hours of energy — the amount of energy you'd burn if you ran seven miles. If, for a whole year, you stayed off the treadmill and rode the bike five times per week instead, you'd save 160 kilowatt hours of energy — roughly the energy you'd expend by running the length of Interstate 5 from Mexico to the Canadian border.

Bring your own workout towel instead of using one that your gym provides. You'll not only reduce your exposure to harsh detergents, bleaches, and other disinfectants, but you'll also help save water and energy as well. If just 1 percent of fitness club members in the U.S. were to start bringing their own workout towels, 4,000 less load of laundry would have to be washed per day — an annual savings of more than 36 million gallons of water.

If you buy bath salts or bubble bath, try to buy concentrated varieties. For example, bubble bath brands that recommend one tablespoon (one-half ounce, or one capful) per bath will last twice as long as those that suggest one ounce (two capfuls) per bath. If you buy a 16-ounce plastic bottle of bubble bath every other month and switched to a more concentrated version, you could save a total of about one-quarter pound of plastic and $10 to $20 per year or more. If one in 100 households decreased their bubble bath purchases in this way, the savings would total 250,000 pounds of plastic. This much plastic could build a wading pool the size of Wrigley Field.

You can minimize waste by buying eyeliner pencils encased in wood instead of pencils or liquids contained within plastic. Wood shavings have the potential to biodegrade, whereas plastics do not. If one in 20 eyeliner users switched from using plastic-encased pencils to wooden ones, nearly 10,000 pounds of plastic could be saved.

If you use pressed eye shadow, choose a brand that provides a reusable compact with slots for refills. Each time you buy a refill instead of an entirely new container you'll reduce your costs, the amount of energy used to produce and ship the hard plastic, glass, or chrome packaging (some of which come with mirrors), and the amount of waste you discard when it's empty. If one in 25 women chose refillable eye shadow, more than 350,000 pounds of wasted cosmetics containers could be saved each year.

If the lotion you usually buy comes with a pump dispenser, you can avoid sending another hand pump to the landfill by purchasing a refill container with a flip-top and just reusing your empty bottle. If 10 percent of U.S. households made a onetime purchase of a lotion bottle without an attached pump, the plastic saved would be an estimated 250,000 pounds — enough lotion pumps to fill nearly 1,200 tanning booths from floor to ceiling.

Use bars of soap versus liquid wash. It's less expensive, and it saves packaging waste. The average bar of soap lasts for about 20 showers, whereas a 16-ounce bottle of body wash lasts for an average of 80 showers. But body wash costs on average more than four times as much as soap. If every U.S. household replaced a bottle of body wash with a bar of soap, roughly 2.5 million pounds of plastic containers could be diverted from the waste stream.

Given that the average woman may inadvertently ingest more than four pounds of lipstick in her lifetime, you'll want to look for lip color made from plant-derived ingredients instead of from synthetic oils, paraffin waxes, and toxic coal tar dyes (look for FD&C or D&C followed by a color and number). If one in five lipstick wearers began demanding plant-based options, total petroleum product consumption would decrease by more than 825,000 pounds per year.

Hope I helped!

-the deviate