Global Footprint Network Test

First Attempt

How often do you eat animal-based products?

How much of the food that you eat is unprocessed, unpackaged or locally grown?

We get all of our non-fish meats from local farms, and our produce (during the region’s growing season) comes from local growers. Though during the winter, those farms either bring less to market, or don’t come all-together.

Which housing type best describes your home?

is the difference between the multi-story apartment option and the luxury condo just in ownership? I wonder what differences this option makes in the calculations

What material is your house constructed with?

At this point, I feel like some of these options are too general?

Also, how does the lifespan of the building factor into this? A new build would definitely have a bigger impact on someone’s footprint than one that’s been around for awhile, right?

How many people live in your household?

I’m going to try a few options here, because “in our building” is a different number than “in our unit” so I’m not sure which they mean by household. But since I defined my home as condos, then I say the building is the household?

So there are 12 units, all roughly 900sqft. Pretty sure there are more than 10 people in the building, but that’s as far as the slider goes…

Do you have electricity in your home?

yes

How energy efficient is your home?

What percentage of your home’s electricity comes from renewable resources?

Now in all honesty, I JUST changed this metric bc the question had me dig into my electricity provider’s website a bit deeper, so NOW it’s 100%, but that does come with some caveats.

Namely that the Dominion (VA’s big provider) can pull from nearby sources (Mostly solar and biomass) or across the Eastern US (a lot more options). I figured opting into the second option would be best since it’s funding more varied sources, even though they may be further away?

Let me know if this assumption is incorrect, though

Also! I can’t control what the other folks in my building are doing, so I’m assuming this is more like an exchange of value somewhere. I wonder about that.

Compared to your neighbors, how much trash do you generate?

Being in a condo or apartment with shared bins gives you a wonderful opportunity to see what your neighbors are throwing out, and people throw out a lot of things that should just be tossed in the trash bin unfortunately. I don’t think of myself as like a trash and recycling warrior, but is a little more thought and/or effort too much to ask for?

Couple of things here:

• I do like the feeling of physical books of digital readers, definitely a personal preference there

• Also on recycling, our community’s recycling gets tossed all into the same bins without sorting, and I have no idea what happens further down the line. So that’s potentially problematic

How far do you travel by car or motorcycle each week?

I’m very privileged to work from home, so my driving distance is pretty low here.

What is the average fuel economy of the vehicles you use most often?

With no option to say that I’m not driving a motorcycle, I guess I need to get one now (shucks)

When you travel by car, how often do you carpool?

Pretty straightforward here, I think. Sometimes I go places alone and sometimes my wife and I go places together

How far do you travel on public transportation each week?

How many hours do you fly each year?

I don’t fly often, so this one’s a little tough to average

Results

• Overshoot day: By this date, we would have used as much from nature as Earth can renew in the entire year. In 2020, Earth Overshoot day for humanity was August 22.

From this graph, it looks like my biggest impact is from my house. This feels like the least accessible leverage point to change though. And changing to the other option that our home could be considered as (apartment) lowers the numbers. So the math is confusing there.

US Biocapacity per person vs the Ecological footprint per person

Solutions

What Does a Sustainable Lifestyle Look Like?

Biggest Leverage points

• Shelter

  • Changed to what I can identify as a Living Building/ Passivhaus/ Earthship idea

• Food

  • Switched to Vegetarian diet with some fish

Results after changes:

Everything else was kept the same, so the bar graph with consumption categories skews visually relative to data amounts.

Thoughts on changes made, results, and the possibility of living sustainably

The biggest change in the number was made not by the food intake, but the housing switch. Definitely a hard thing to accomplish seeing as that costs a tremendous amount of money to do. The site makes a great point that a person’s footprint isn’t solely (footprint pun, nice) on them. It involves the decisions and impacts made from the community and local/ national government’s choices. I think it’s going to be impossible to make the numbers on this site go down to below or at “sustainable” because it doesn’t allow us to change the sliders at those levels.

So it seems like the best choice to seek a sustainable lifestyle is to push our governing bodies towards more sustainable systems to, in turn, improve our own scores.

10-year Plan

We’ve talked about this in the program before, but the most effective way to change habits is by creating systems that will eventually accomplish a goal through easily-repeatable patterns, rather than saying, “Achieve net-zero by 2050” without any plan for what happens 2051. So what are some patterns or systems we can make to reduce our carbon footprint?

Change how we eat

This one’s pretty straight-forward and easily-accomplished. You can’t eat what you don’t buy.

I mean, I guess you could steal it, but let’s assume some level of positive morality.

1. Buy local and sustainable

   1. More Vegetables

   2. Fish can be very sustainable

Get involved locally

This is probably the leverage point with the biggest impact. When we start to have conversations with our neighbors about the cost-savings of renewables, I think that makes things like that more approachable. And then we can make our agenda heard to local representatives, get these things in motion on the government side, and most importantly, vote for them.

The house isn’t an accessible leverage point

Where we MAY be able to afford a new house in the next 10 years, the odds of it being a hyper-sustainable or even net-positive structure are slim, and this option is DEFINITELY not accessible to everyone. This shouldn’t have as much weight in our plan.

Want to try it yourself?

Head over to the Global Footprint Network's tool and give it a whirl! Let me know how it went for you!