My Environmental Footprint and What I Plan To Do About It

Yesterday, I used several calculators to determine my environmental impact with regard to various factors, as part of an assignment for a university course focused on sustainability. These factors were my carbon footprint, overall ecological footprint, slavery footprint, and water footprint.

The quizzes asked me various questions and asked me to quantify aspects of my lifestyle, like what I ate, how often I drove, how often I went out shopping, whether or not I left the faucet on while brushing my teeth, and so on. These were then used by the calculators to generate a report for me estimating my impact on the environment in that area.

From my carbon footprint calculation, it is clear that the category contributing most to my carbon footprint is “home”, which includes things like electricity and water usage. On the other hand, the ecological footprint calculator results I received indicated that food was by far my largest consumption category. I have a hunch that reducing my meat consumption would have an outsized impact on this. While doing the water footprint calculator, I was blown away by how much my water usage shot up when I put in that I am a meat eater. I had been aware that factory-farmed animals consume a substantial amount of water during the course of their lives, especially cows, but I had no idea it would literally triple my water usage.

After completing all these calculations, I was thinking about how much our decadent first-world lifestyles depend on the exploitation of people in the third world, whether that be through mining the materials that go into our electronic devices, producing our food, manufacturing our clothes, or any number of other things. The idea that, according to my slavery footprint calculation, 24 people across the world have to be enslaved to make possible the goods and services that prop up my lifestyle is truly horrifying.

So, what can be done about this (besides feeling guilty)? Well, part of this assignment includes committing to at least three ways to reduce my footprint during this academic quarter, and there are a few I was able to brainstorm. They must be SMART goals, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Bound for those who haven’t heard of this concept before. They are:

1. I will only eat red meat once a week at most. Most of the meat I currently eat is beef, and it is widely known that the raising of cows has a massive impact on the natural environment, from the food and water they consume to the processing necessary for the milk and beef the produce, to even the greenhouse gases they emit throughout their lifetimes. I believe that reducing beef consumption is one of the most effective steps I can take to reduce my footprint, especially in the water department, given what I saw with my water footprint results. This initiative could be as simple as replacing meat with a plant-based protein source, such as a protein-rich vegetable (spinach, kale, broccoli, etc.), beans, or nuts.
2. I will limit myself to 5-minute showers. In the US, federal law prohibits new shower heads from putting out more than 2.5 gallons of water per minute. Assuming my shower head at home puts out the maximum of 2.5 gal/min, if I take a 15–20 minute shower like I usually do, that’s 37.5–50 gallons of water gone from just one shower. Considering that I shower probably 300 days a year, that’s anywhere between 11,250 and 15,000 gallons I’ve used just from showering in a single year. This is not even counting the energy usage from heating the water to a quite-high temperature, which I also do every time. Limiting myself to 5 minutes in the shower per time will cut my water usage from showering by 67–75%, saving thousands of gallons of water every year. I am planning to set up a timer on my phone for 5 minutes, quickly hustling to finish up and get out of the shower if it goes off.
3. I will wait until the dishwasher is absolutely full before starting it up. Running the dishwasher in my apartment uses ~25 gallons of water each time, and that may be an overly conservative estimate given that I usually use the “heavy” setting to ensure the cleanest dishes are produced, which probably uses even more water. There is no need to run a half-full dishwasher, and it is wasteful to use the same amount of water on a half load as on a full load when the dishwasher is only doing half the amount of work in the former case.

I am looking forward to testing my mettle with these commitments. It might get difficult at times, but I am confident in my ability to push through and make a difference!

Here are the links to the calculators if anyone is interested.

· Ecological Footprint

· Carbon Footprint

· Water Footprint

· Slavery Footprint