Ecological Footprint Update

At the beginning of the quarter we were given the task of measuring our ecological footprint to see how much of an impact we make on the environment based on our lifestyle choices. Now that we're approaching the last few weeks of this sustainability and marketing course, I'll be sharing the new results from my footprint calculator to see if the changes I've made this quarter have made a significant enough change in the impact I create.

To give you a little bit of a refresher the goals I wanted to commit to for this quarter were reducing my coffee consumption to 3 cups per week, using the dishwasher (when necessary) to help cut down on water waste from hand washing and taking the 10-minute walk to class instead of driving to reduce my carbon footprint. Since my EF Reduction Goals were mostly related to cutting down my water consumption and I calculated my water footprint at the beginning of the quarter, I decided to recalculate that footprint based on the changes I've made and here are the results:


So when I first started out on reducing my water footprint, I was at 1554 gallons/day and the household overall was 3,109. I have brought that number down to 1,500 gallons/day as an individual and 3000 gallons/day for the household. I think that bringing it down by 50 gallons/day for my individual footprint (which may not seem like a lot at first) is pretty significant because I believe that it's still a change in the right direction. After analyzing my results more in depth I found that the biggest contributors to my water footprint were my shopping habits and diet so if I can find more ways in which I can make changes to my consumption patterns in these aspects, I can continue to significantly decrease my footprint as well.

In the end, I'm pretty satisfied with how this has turned out because I've made some pretty good small steps in making a big difference. I was able to stick to my goals and I will try to continue them for as long as I can or adopt new ways of reducing my footprint not only in water but in other ecological aspects too.