Calculate Your Carbon Footprint and Reduce Your Impact

Our homes consume energy in a lot of different ways. The best way to measure this is from your utility bills. Every appliance you use and light that you leave on will be reflected in your bill. If multiple people live in your house, your individual emissions will be lower because the total bill is shared among everyone that lives there.

The emissions from your home aren't directly visible at your home. Most of the emissions are released from the power plant that generates your power and through transmitting the energy to your house.

The garbage that we throw away usually goes to a landfill to sit and rot or it may be incenerated. This process releases CO2 emissions into the air as well as other chemicals and toxins into the ground, air, and water. The average American generates 4.5lbs of garbage a day. The CO2 emissions based on typical American consumption levels are considered in these calculations.

Recycling can cut your garbage emissions by almost 40%. There are still some CO2 emissions related to recycling, but this is much less that going to a landfill. Plus, the recycled material will be reused to create new products instead of having to be created from new raw materials.

Your actual fuel efficiency depends on many factors including the size of your car, how your car is maintained, and your driving habits. The amount of miles that you drive along with the fuel efficiency of your car determines how much emissions you produce.

All other factors being the same, you can technically drive 10,000 miles in a car that gets 50 MPG and produce the same CO2 emissions as driving 5,000 in a car that gets 25 MPG. This obviously doesn't include other factors that can effect the pollution from your car. Driving a hybrid will pollute a lot less than driving a non-hybrid vehicle, and driving a well maintained car (with all the emissions equipment working properly) should pollute less than a poorly kept vehicle.

Air travel produces almost as much CO2 emissions per passenger per mile as one passenger driving the same distance alone in a car. The overall effect of air travel may be much worse than a car, though. Besides the CO2 emissions, the planes also emit nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, soot, and water vapor (contrails) directly into the atmosphere at high altitudes, which may double the overall warming effect on the climate.

Researchers Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin at the University of Chicago concluded that the average American diet (including all food processing steps) results in the annual release of an extra 1.5 tons of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. University of Chicago research paper

There was also a similar report published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, in 2005, total meat consumption (red meat, poultry, and fish) amounted to 200 pounds per person.