What's My Shoe Size? Calculating My Footprint

Calculating your “footprint” can be a great starting point to identify areas of your lifestyle where you consume the most amount of resources. But what’s the difference between and ecological and carbon footprint? Ecological footprint calculators are different from carbon footprint calculators in that they include more components of everyday lifestyle in more relative terms, whereas carbon footprint calculators are more specific to energy consumption but often allow for more precise responses.

While I explore different footprint calculators and results in this post, this article is not a comparison between different tools. Instead, I will show you how I interpret the results and ways to implement changes to reduce my impact.

Ecological Footprint Calculator

I used the Global Footprint Network – Ecological Footprint Calculator to estimate my ecological footprint. This tool utilizes five different factors:

Food
Shelter
Mobility
Goods
Services

Questions were answered mostly on a sliding scale (never to always) and there were opportunities to answer in further detail. This tool calculates the number of earths we (humans) we need if everyone lived like you. And the flip flop of that being what the overshoot day would be (when earth would run out of resources) if everyone lived like you.

Generally, this is a very relative calculator but can help you identify areas where you consume the most amount of resources. My results are shown below, as you can see, food and transportation were my biggest contributors to my ecological footprint.

According to my responses, if everyone lived like I do, we would need 2.2 Earth’s to sustain that lifestyle. The “See Details” option shows you averages for other countries.

As you can see in the graph above, transportation (mobility) and food are the two largest contributors to my ecological footprint. The end of the survey prompts the user on ways to donate to mitigate their overall footprint.

The majority of my travel comes from commuting back and forth to work, however, I am lucky to have an amazing supervisor that lets me work two days a week from home, which helps reduce my travel impacts. I have explained my food choices in a previous post but have been actively focusing on reducing meat consumption. Another option, based on prompts in the survey, is to buy more whole foods to reduce packaging, as well as sourcing from more locally grown options.

Carbon Footprint Calculator

To calculate my carbon footprint, I accessed the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) online tool. This calculator focuses specifically on carbon emissions, utilizing three factors:

Energy;
Transportation; and
Waste

According to this calculator, my household is responsible for 24,429 pounds of annual carbon emissions, which is almost half of the national average (see below). This tool provides specific mitigation options for each component, and then shows the cumulative carbon emissions reduction if you got 100 people to join (what an inspiring feature!)

The results are more limited than those of the ecological footprint calculator, however, they are more precise due to the nature of the survey.

As you can see from the results above, when it comes to carbon emissions, based on the EPA calculator, home energy is my biggest contributor. This is based on the monthly average of oil and electricity my household uses. Ways to reduce consumption would be to ensure all fixtures and appliances are energy efficient, reducing excess use of air conditioning in the summer, and making sure our home is well insulated.

Consistency vs Accuracy

There are questions over the accuracy of these calculators to truly estimate an individual’s impact. However, in my opinion, these tools are best utilized as general guidelines to inform ourselves on our biggest contributors to our footprints and how to reduce them. Checking in with these calculators as a means of consistency is more important than their level of accuracy. Compare these footprint calculators to the home body mass index bathroom scales which provide users with bone density, body fat percentage, and pounds of muscle mass. As long as you are using the same tool consistently, the relative results which show trends in use are more important than the absolute accuracy.

What are the take aways:

Online footprint tools are a great way of identifying our biggest consumptive habits
Results from online tools may not be highly accurate, but provide a consistent baseline to check in with our personal impacts
It may not feel like small changes in our habits can result in significant reductions of emissions and resource use, however, as the tools show, our actions when combined have cumulative and huge impacts (for good and bad!)