Putting your best foot forward

Last week we blogged about school-wide waste audits as a way to raise awareness about the amount of garbage produced in schools and to create plans for waste minimization. With the recent attention on the climate change talks in Copenhagen, we wanted to highlight another way schools and businesses have been putting their best foot forward, by calculating their carbon footprint.

As part of a national High School Climate Challenge, students from Selkirk, a high school in B.C., just established their school’s carbon footprint, and identified opportunities for the school to reduce its use of electricity, natural gas, water and amount of solid waste.

Carbon footprints are a measurement of the relative impact of our actions and a way to help us contextualize global warming in our daily lives, at home, at the office and at play. Our ‘footprint’ is an estimate of our direct or indirect involvement in carbon emissions from carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases emitted over the full life cycle of the products and services that we use, and our patterns of life. This would include the manufacturing, transportation, use and disposal of any given product. The choices we make in our travel, the food we eat, and what we buy and throw away all influence our carbon footprint.

There are many ways to calculate a carbon footprint and there are several calculators on the web. The Nature Conservancy’s Carbon Footprint Calculator is a quick and easy way to calculate you and/or your family’s total tons of CO2 equivalent per year. (Good on you if you come anywhere near the world average per person!)

Chances are that this exercise will leave you looking to new habits such as eating less meat, working from home when possible, and rethinking your patterns of consumption. In most office places and schools, turning to products that have a considerably reduced impact on the earth, such as the AusPen refillable, recyclable, non-toxic dry-erase markers will significantly reduce the amount of toxic waste in local landfills and help you tread lighter.

For the full story on Selkirk’s Climate Action Team, visit: http://www.wildsight.ca/news/780