Happy Earth Day everyone! What a perfect day to start my journey to carb reduction. In order to measure success, I’ve started by calculating my annual carbon emissions…
10 tonnes! 2 elephants’ worth of carbon!*
That was quite a shock for me as it’s the same as the average per person in the UK and, since I’m vegetarian, I recycle and I rarely fly, I was expecting my contribution to this problem to be considerably lower than the national average!
Apparently 39% of my 10 tonnes come from my home, 30% from food, 26% from miscellaneous items and 5% from travel.
Here’s a link to the WWF’s carbon footprint calculator. I tried a few and found this to be the best combination of quick, easy and accurate.
Anyway, after recovering from the initial shock of my average carbon footprint, I am determined to get on with the business of reducing it. A large proportion of my carbon emissions appear to come from food so here is my pledge:
“I AM GOING VEGAN!”
Just not yet. I need a few days (maybe weeks) to get my head around it. But I will. GOING VEGAN is one way of making a significant reduction to your carbon footprint.
In the meantime, I’m going to research some other more immediate ways I can start to reduce my carbs. One of them is to KEEP THE TOP OF YOUR FRIDGE CLEAR. So I’m off to do that right now.
*Wikipedia 2019 African elephants weigh 4500-5900kg
Journey to a reduced carbon footprint 