Since the start of 2019, we at swrm have been challenging ourselves to consistently reach a sustainable carbon footprint in our daily lives. While this might seem a simple task – in today’s society, it has been seemingly impossible. With mixed success we have been able to live many sustainable weeks and the occasional month but the prevailing trend for the first half of the year has been to miss our goal.
What goals should you be setting? Keep your CO2 emissions less than:
- Yearly: 2.4 Ton / 2.2 Tonne
- Monthly: 408lb / 185kg
- Daily: 13lb / 6kg
How should you keep track of this? In general your daily activities are broken down into a carbon footprint from household, transportation and food, which each make up a third. Some basics:
Home: Find the kWh in your electricity bill and multiply by 1.56.
Remember if you share the household electricity to divide the total by how many it is shared between. That goes the same for carpooling.
Driving: Divide your weekly miles by your vehicles MPG (US average is 24.7) and multiply by 51.9.
Transport: Train, Subway & Buses – multiply the time you spend on public transport by 0.44.
Food: Here are some basic CO2 emissions per serving:
Keep track of how you are progressing over the week in order to see where your biggest contributors are.
There is a lot more to your carbon footprint than these basic activities but for most people this covers everyday life.
What were our 3 biggest challenges?
- Location: The location you live in has an enormous effect on the outcome. Residing in NYC we are at the mercy of ConEd in the type of power that is delivered to our home. Living in an apartment means no availability to install solar panels, as such, the majority of the carbon footprint comes from our household. The good news is they are slowly rolling out the opportunity to switch over to renewable sources.
- Winter: Winter challenges are some of the hardest to overcome. Limiting the heating is hard when you’re spending most of the time indoors. Finding local produce that is in season is impossible and no one can live on root vegetables alone.
- Children: Not all of our team have children but every parent will tell you they are a huge responsibility to raise, now imagine also trying to continue sustainable practices throughout the journey.
So our challenge to everyone: can you keep a sustainable footprint for a day, a week, the whole year? Just be warned you will find it extremely hard from the first day but as with all skills, becoming sustainable is a work in progress. Practice makes perfect!
*These are very basic, high level ways to calculate your carbon footprint. They are meant to be used as a guide only. For a more detailed and accurate assessment use the tools on our app and website.
