Getting my carbon footprint down to size

My feet are still big.

But not as big as they were five months ago.

I'm talking about my ecological footprint: how much land, air and water my lifestyle takes up.

I committed last Earth Day to reduce mine, which, despite my self-assessment as a greenie, was a whopping 6.6 hectares, according to one website calculator. That's a hectare less than the Canadian average, but 4.4 hectares more than the global one.

"If everyone lived like you, we'd need 3.7 planets," the website (myfootprint.org) declared damningly.

Today, when I factor in all the changes I've made, my footprint measures 5.8 hectares – still not as small as I'd like it, but better.

How have I done it? Mostly by addressing the big stuff.

The three biggest drivers of a fat North American footprint are food, transit, and home heating and electricity, says William Rees, the University of British Columbia professor who pioneered the concept of an ecological footprint.

We live in suburbs without sidewalks and drive our SUVs to the corner store. As much as 80 per cent of our fruit and vegetables are trucked or flown in from as far away as China. Our homes leak heat and our appliances vacuum up energy – a lot of it from fume-belching coal-fired plants.

To change most of these things, we need to act collectively – building walkable communities and renewable electricity sources. But there is still room for small, individual changes. Baby steps.

To address my home's soaring hydro use, the first thing I did was replace all 52 incandescent light bulbs with energy-saving compact fluorescents. It's considered the first rite of passage for an eco-convert and it's relatively painless. Compact-fluorescent bulbs use a quarter of the electricity the old-fashioned kind suck up, and since lighting makes up 15 per cent of an average home's electricity bill, they save money in the long-run.

It took less than an hour and cost about $120 but, according to my calculations, will save us 779 kilowatt hours of electricity by the end of the year. That's almost a whole month's worth of electricity for us.

Step 2 was dealing with all the power vampires – the appliances in our home that suck energy even when they are off.

It turns out our computer was the biggest culprit. Even when turned off, it sucked 28 watts of power constantly. The Internet connection was also leaking energy. Multiply that over the year, and we were wasting more than two months' worth of electricity.

The solution was easy. We have now plugged the computer, televisions and DVD player into power bars. When we aren't using them, we turn the power bar off. So simple, and part of the reason our electricity bills have been cut in half.

Next was the clothes dryer. It was the biggest energy-sucking culprit in our home. You can't buy an EnergyStar model, because, as the program's federal manager in Ottawa, Anne Wilkins, told me, "basically, they're big heating elements in a drum. The real EnergyStar dryer is a clothesline outside."

So that's what we did. This winter, we will decorate our basement with drying racks and, by the end of the year, we figure we'll have saved another month's worth of electricity.

Finally, I called an energy auditor. They are like home doctors who diagnose your house's energy ailments. He said our 1930s home was about 43-per-cent efficient – meaning more than half of the heat, or cool air, we pump into it is wasted. He gave us a list of treatments, the first of which called for a new furnace.

This week, we are ripping out the huffing 76-per-cent efficient model and putting in a new, 96-per-cent efficient one. We've paid dearly for it – about $4,000 after government rebates – but our calculations suggest we'll make that money back in less than five years.

We've also hired contractors to seal the cracks in the walls and ceiling and pad the insulation in our attic – so our furnace no longer heats the street outside our home.

In total, with those changes, the auditor tells us our home will be 64-per-cent efficient. That should mean we'll cut our heating bills by a fifth.
Catherine Porter


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