Carbon Footprint

Climate change has been becoming our problem for several years. There are many researches to prove the climate change phenomenon. There are some people doing the research to prove that climate change is not a problem, though. Actually, climate change is a natural phenomenon at first, but people behavior makes it accelerate. Climate change is caused by greenhouse gases (GHG), and the dominant gases are CO₂, CH₄ and NO_x. In recent years, the term ‘carbon footprint’ became something happening. Unfortunately, there are some people who don’t really understand what ‘carbon footprint’ is.

Carbon footprint (CF) – also named Carbon profile – is the overall amount of carbon dioxide (CO­­­₂) and other greenhouse gas emissions associated with product, along its supply-chain and something including from use and end-of-life recovery and disposal (European Platform on Life Cycle Assessment,2007). Nowadays, carbon footprint is often to use as a term to show the amount of carbon being emitted by an activity or organization. Carbon footprint usually measured in tones. If we breakdown the term ‘carbon footprint’, we’ll get two words, carbon and footprint. Carbon is a chemical substance that contributes to greenhouse gases and global warming. Footprint is something that you leave on your way. So that, we can conclude that carbon footprint is an amount of carbon that we leave (emit) on our way (activity) that contributes to the global warming.

Carbon footprint source usually comes from large scale such as land clearance, agriculture, livestock, industry, manufacturing, mining etc. and from smaller scale like transportation, food consumption, home and individual stuff. Because there are many people in this planet, individual behavior becomes one of the priorities. In order to know how much the carbon footprints that we left, we can use some question such as:

·         How often you eat animal-based products

·         How often you buy organic product

·         How often you buy the local product

·         What kind of vehicle you travel in

·         How many hours you spend in your vehicle

·         How often you use public transportation

·         What kind of your house you live in

·         How many people in your house

·         How much gas or electricity you use

·         How often you buy your household items

·         How much water you use

·         How much you recycle

There are many carbon footprints’ calculator in the internet, you can use it freely. From those calculators we can know how much earth we need to live with our current behavior. We only have one earth, though.

WWF Australia

WWF UK

 Earth can’t duplicate itself and becomes many counts of earth, but we can change our behavior to protect our only-one earth. So, it’s our time to make a better world. As the main population in the earth that contributes to the carbon emissions, we should change our behavior.

In order to change something, we have to do three things: start from ourselves, start from the most little thing, start from now on (Aa’ Gym, 2003). There are some little things that we can do to reduce our carbon footprint and its benefit:

• Reduce the amount energy that we use à we can save the energy production
• Buy locally à we don’t need to travel
• Drive less and walk/bike more àless pollution and healthier
• Use public transportation à less pollution, get many colleagues
• Reduce and recycle the waste à less the waste generation
• Plant trees à freshen the air

They are just some of many things that we can do; you can find information and implement it.

So, carbon footprint is a term to show how much amount of carbon that you’ve left after your activity. There are some sources of carbon footprint.  The important one is us. We can leave our carbon footprint from our daily activity, such as: food consuming, using the energy (electricity or gas), transportation and so on. If we use the online footprint calculator, it will show us how many earth that we need. Because we only have one earth, so we have to change our behavior to optimize our earth capability.

 Bibliography

___. (2007). “CARBON FOOTPRINT – what it is and how to measure it”. European Platform in Life Cycle Assessment, Ispra (VA), Italy

“Carbon Footprint”. Global Footprint Network. <http://www.footprintnetwork.org/pt/index.php/GFN/page/carbon_footprint/>

“Carbon Footprint/ what is it?”. Find Energy Saving. <http://www.findenergysavings.co.uk/carbon-footprint>

“Carbon Footprint/ measuring it”. Find Energy Saving. <http://www.findenergysavings.co.uk/carbon-footprint/measuring-your-carbon-footprint >

“Carbon Footprint/ reducing it”. Find Energy Saving. <http://www.findenergysavings.co.uk/carbon-footprint/reducing-your-carbon-footprint>

“Footprint Calculator”. WWF Australia. <http://www.wwf.org.au/our_work/people_and_the_environment/human_footprint/footprint_calculator/ >

“Footprint Calculator”. WWF UK.  <http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/ >

Wiedmann, T. and Minx,J. (2008). “A Definition of ‘Carbon Footprint’”. In: C. C. Perstova, Ecological Economics Research Trends: Chapter 1, pp. 1-11, Nova Science Publishers, Hauppauge NY, USA.