Princess, Townsville, Australia: My carbon footprint

Environment   Sep 17, 2020 by Princess Danao, Townsville, Australia

In the International Student Challenge Carbon Footprint Challenge, my carbon footprint was calculated to be around 13,677 kgs, higher than the average global citizen. Even higher than Australia’s 11,771kgs, that reflects how well the economy is (albeit wasteful).

The results for home is reasonably low because instead of using air conditioner most of the time- we use fans set in a moderate speed. Purchases is also relatively small, as I tend to receive hand-me-downs and prefer to thrift more than shop. Food is nearly close to the region’s average as there are seven people in the household.

All of my results mentioned so far are fairly accurate but I believe that it’s more of an estimation of my actual carbon footprint due to the fact that I was uncertain of (basically forgot) the answers to a lot of the questions so the system had to use the average results as the answers.

There is also the added fact of the anomaly: Transportation. All of the answers I registered before the ‘airplane flights’ question was still within the vicinity of my region’s total average, and I believe that the results to the normal means of travel (ie public transit, buses and cars etc.) was accurate (well except for the missing blanks because I didn’t know what the answer was). Most were accurate except for the ‘airplane flights’ question. As the question asked for the number of airplane flights in the last year, I entered in the number of flights from last year as it’s not possible to go overseas this year because of covid19. To explain to non-English speakers last year exactly means from last year, but in the last year can perhaps suggests what happened in the past 365 days. It was eight flights (round trips included) last year in around January. The problem is, it is not necessarily per year or so (because the results is calculating my total footprint per year), I usually only take flights once every 3 years (though I admit that the number of times was going to slowly increase in the present time if there was not a certain disease going around).

Despite everything, the questions asked made me realize that I should be way more aware of my surroundings, how I’m using them and keeping it in mind to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide (in relation to me). This was very evident when I realized that I didn’t have the answers to a lot of the questions because I wasn’t paying attention to how much waste I make, how much water and electricity I use, etc.

Post comment