This weeks homework we had to do the footprint challenge. This is a program that asks you some questions about your life style and how you live, then it generates how many earths you would need to sustain your life style if everyone in the world had your life style. My family would use 2.4 earths if everyone in the world had our life style. I thought that we would do better than this because we car pool a lot and we try to buy local food and we don’t use plastic bags. I think that we could improve on this by:
- Buying in bulk instead of buying lots of little packets.
- Turning the lights off
- Switching to low energy bulbs
- Putting an extra jumper on instead of turning the heater on
- Turning the air-con up by 2 degrees in the summer
- Recycling more water
- Installing solar panels
- Growing our own vegetables
But if my family halved the amount of animal products we buy we would only use 1.9 earths.
If you want to have a go on this click on the hyperlink: http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/gfn/page/calculators/