Healthy Footnotes

Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

Footprint in the sand

As we go about our daily lives, we leave footprints of all shapes in sizes in our path. Some are small and snow-covered, while others are barely recognizable, remnants of a puddle we passed through a few blocks away. 

But what about carbon footprints? Evidence of our presence doesn’t always manifest on a sidewalk. In this case, we notice it in the air we breathe and the oceans we swim in. 

Believe it or not, even our favorite slip on sneakers or comfortable boots for women can have an impact on the environment and climate change by the way we choose to recycle or upcycle them. By learning about simple ways to reduce your carbon footprint you can have a real impact on the environment. This article will take a closer look at what a carbon footprint is and guide you through some everyday solutions you can implement as quickly as today. 

Reducing Your Footprint at Home

When we think about reducing our carbon footprint, the easiest place to start is at home. It’s often the place we spend the most time, after all. By making some small changes in the way we live, we can make a measurable difference in our environment.

Recycling Best Practices

Let’s start with a classic. Technically, recycling has been around since the 1800s. (With no such thing as municipal waste disposal, you didn’t really have much of a choice.) But recycling as we now know it started around the 1970s, with rates increasing every decade since.1

You’d think with all that time we’d have perfected the system by now, but the truth is, it can still be pretty complicated to know what to recycle and how. Here are some tips to help you out:2

Tips for Energy Efficiency

There has been great advancement in energy efficiency in the past couple of decades, such as solar panels. The key to taking advantage of these advancements is to make sure your home is equipped as efficiently as possible to help reduce your carbon footprint and prevent global warming. Some things to check are:3

How to Reduce Carbon Footprint at Work

If you’re not at home, there’s a good chance you’re at work. Thankfully, there are numerous tips to reduce your carbon footprint at the workplace. Here’s how you can easily implement them:5

Transportation: How to Go Green When You’re on The Go

Cars and planes are a major source of carbon dioxide emissions in the world and, while hybrids and electric cars are starting to make an impact, driving is still one of the biggest factors we can control to reduce our carbon footprint. Here are some other ways to reduce emissions caused by transportation:

The Bigger Picture

We’ve gone over some simple ways you can start to reduce your carbon footprint, but some of you may be asking whether any of this is really worth it. Why is it important to reduce carbon footprint anyway? Let’s look at some of these larger concepts to show you why it’s more important than you might think. 

What Is a Carbon Footprint?

It helps to understand what a carbon footprint is in order to make sense of why you should want to reduce yours. Put simply, a carbon footprint is the total number of greenhouse gas emissions you produce throughout the duration of your life. The most common greenhouse gases include:

Products, as well as people, all have carbon footprints. As people, most of our carbon footprint will be as a result of:

If you’re curious to learn more about what kind of impact you, personally, have on the planet, use a carbon footprint calculator. That way, you’ll be able to reflect on some of your lifestyle choices and see exactly where you’ve got room to grow. 

Why Reduce Your Carbon Footprint?

The average American has a carbon footprint of around 16 tons. The average carbon footprint globally is about four tons. To avoid a rise in global temperatures by 2050, many scientists think that the average needs to drop to about two tons.7 If that doesn’t happen, we run the risk of facing more severe weather events like wildfires and floods that many of us are already starting to see happen more regularly.

While climate change can sometimes feel daunting and too big of a problem to address individually, our actions can make a difference. While reducing your individual carbon footprint may seem like an insignificant drop in the bucket, if everyone starts taking steps to reduce their emissions, we might start to see that bucket fill up faster than we think. Simple changes can make a huge difference, even small changes like doing an at home workout once a week can greatly reduce your environmental impact. 

Larger governmental actions will need to support this movement, but making small changes in our lives is a meaningful—and manageable—place for us to start.

Better Health and Wellness with Vionic

Here at Vionic, we’re more than people who specialize in shoes. We care about carbon footprints—and not just because of the potential for foot-related puns. But rather, because they affect all of us. The more we can take care of our environment, the healthier and happier we’ll be as a whole.

That’s why we put a focus on your health and wellbeing. Whether we’re imparting simple tips to improve your health or providing you with supportive, podiatrist-designed footwear specializing in orthotics, we’re always thinking about your comfort and well-being, from your individual footprint to the world around you.

 

Sources: 

  1.  https://www.history.com/news/recycling-history-america 
  2.  https://www.nytimes.com/guides/year-of-living-better/how-to-reduce-your-carbon-footprint 
  3.  https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/12/27/35-ways-reduce-carbon-footprint/ 
  4.  https://www.wired.co.uk/article/reduce-carbon-footprint 
  5.  https://oceanfdn.org/how-to-reduce-your-carbon-footprint-at-the-office/ 
  6.  https://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/publications/pubdocs/ENERGY%20STAR%20Office%20Equipment%20Brochure_508.pdf 
  7. https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/carbon-footprint-calculator/?redirect=https-301 
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