Each individual has is own carbon footprint, calculated on many different actions like food, transports, daily life, energy consumption, activities…. Nowadays with the extreme urgency to act against global warming, it is important to reduce carbon footprint and become carbon neutral. Here are some tips for you!
What is being carbon neutral?
When living on earth, your actions can have an impact on the environment. The impact can be either positive or negative. If you are doing too many negative impacts on the planet, you can try to have a positive impact by changing some habits or participating in reforestation projects for example.
Carbon neutrality refers to an equilibrium state where all carbon dioxide emissions by humans are equals to their removal in the atmosphere by human or nature. As there’s a difference zero between emitted gases and removed gases, there’s this state of carbon neutrality.
Thi term can refer to either on an individual, or a company, a country, the earth. We mainly hear companies and countries trying to be carbon neutral in a few or more years, as an engagement of fighting climate change. Especially since Paris’ Agreement in 2015, but more and more those lately months due to the numerous effects caused by climate change which were devastating this year.
What causes our own carbon footprint to rise?
There are many explications and causes of carbon emissions. The main carbon emissions are emitted by :
- Electricity
- Transport
- Industry
- Commercial and residential sector
- Agriculture
- Land and forestry
Looking at an individual, the main carbon emissions will come from the transport (mainly due to work), energy used in the house, the food (eating meat and fish can add a lot to one person’s carbon footprint), clothes, pharmaceutics, computers phone television radio and IT equipment…
If you want to have an idea about your personal carbon footprint, a lot of calculators exists, so as to give you an idea of your footprint and the number of earth needed to compensate emissions if all humans were consuming the same.
How can we reduce our carbon footprint:
The first step to reducing carbon footprint is to stop emitting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And if you can’t stop all emissions from your life and activity, you can then try to compensate them.
How to stop emitting CO2:
Some domains are more easy to focus on when speaking or stopping carbon emissions.
First is transport.
Of course, it is always different from one to another as situation as very different. But the idea is to stop as much as possible using cars, and trying to use a bicycle or walk. There’s the public transport which will, of course, be a better solution than driving, but bicycling will be the best. You can also try to use less aerial transport.
Energy:
You might not be able to stop all emissions from their consumption. It’s possible to go to greener energy, using solar panels on the roof of a house or building. If you can’t, you can still manage to ask less energy in your place by reducing uses of electronics, unplug cables and devices, shut down, wifi, and other. You don’t leave your home with lights on, so try to do the same for all other equipment.
Stop fast fashion.
First, maybe taking a look at your closet, and looking if you really need to buy more clothes. If the answer is yes, thing second-hand clothes, to give a new life to an old red mommy jeans, buy vintage! And if you don’t like to buy second-hand swimsuits, for example, there are existing brands selling clothes made from recycling. Which has a better impact (or less worst impact) than clothes from fast fashion industry.
Going on the road of vegetarianism or veganism.
Eating meat and fish is not good for the environment, it’s even pretty bad. Of course, it can be hard for meat lovers to become vegetarian, but there’s a lot of possibilities. reducing your consumption little by little, or even eating meat only at restaurants not buying ones anymore can make you go from daily meats lunch to once or twice a week. Some movement like #meatfreemonday is a good start!
Reduce all your waste.
Each day, you are wasting either food or plastic or cartons or whatever. Reducing your waste is an important step to also reduce your own carbon emissions. When you start reducing waste, it’s because you start taking care of what you eat, the quantity, cooking it in another way, not using single-use products and thus buying more ethical products….
You can save co2 emissions or compensate. Here’s a list of few things which can be done easily, and which will have a good impact on the environment.
Saving other’s waste.
It exists some applications fighting waste pollution. You can use it so as to find a restaurant near you and buy at a lower price the waste of the day. You can save money, discover foods and save carbon emissions. (TooGoodToGo)
Better use of internet.
Try to limit your internet CO2 emissions by changing for an ecological search engine which can plant trees, feed animals, donate to socio-environmental projects only thanks to your research. (Ecosia, Lilo, Youcare)
Lower data storage.
All your data from the picture of your holidays last Christmas to the emails you receive daily are stored in data centers. That asks a lot of energy and each of your internet actions emits CO2. One email emits from 4 to 50g of CO2. Thank of deleting emails and unsubscribe from senders. You can also clean all your social media of old and useful posts (see Cleanfox to reduce your email carbon footprint).
Compensate your emissions.
There are many projects you can donate to compensate your emissions. You can choose between many different projects (try to see local initiatives) to plant trees (Weforeste) to clean oceans (4oceans) to protect the environment (?) to adopt à beehive (?) and many others. You will compensate your carbon footprint and support a project and a community
