Facts and Figures

Whats a carbon footprint?

The carbon footprint was created to measure how much carbon an individual/group emitted due to greenhouse gases (fossil fuels) during a span of time.

Why does that matter?

Tracking carbon emissions is used with the intent of halting Global Warming if used by a large population.

Ecological footprint-

Another important measurement tool.  The ecological footprint takes in to account a person’s/group of peoples’ habitual lifestyle (electricity, house size, car usuage, etc.) and measures how much land and resources are taken up to sustain their current lifestyles.

Average american waste-

Americans use 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.

Every month Americans throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper (think: Empire State Building), but all of these jars are recyclable!

Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures a year!

To produce each week’s Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down

The US population discards each year 16,000,000,000 diapers, 1,600,000,000 pens, 2,000,000,000 razor blades, 220,000,000 car tires, and enough aluminum to rebuild the US commercial air fleet four times over.

According to http://www.footprintnetwork.org, if the world population were to use as much resources as an average American we would need 4.05 Earths to survive. Currently the total human population is using 1.5 Earths!

You can find out more at:

http://www.afn.org/~afn21661/Facts.htm

http://www.recycling-revolution.com/recycling-facts.html

http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-recycling

 

My current Carbon footprint:    Average American’s:

   

found on: http://www.nature.org/greenliving/carboncalculator/

My current ecological footprint:                                       My aim for the week:

     

found on: http://www.footprintnetwork.org/pt/index.php/GFN/page/calculators/