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Reducing Your Carbon Debt: Reasons and Tips

by Richard Boettner

Every day you put out excessive amounts of carbon dioxide, which is a major contributor to global warming. At present, in 2007, this is absolutly true for everyone, even in the poorest of countries. Currently there are less than one-tenth of one percent who have off-set their carbon debt, and that is not even a drop in a bucket. All of us, that's right, all of us, need to take responsibility for ourselves or we may as well lie down and die. We are killing our planet at an astonishingly rapid rate, and the head in the sand attitude or that someone else will take care of it, wont work. You need to take repsonsibility for your own life.

So, what do you do about your carbon debt? Lots, but you have to start today. Here is a list, which will continue to change over time and be added to:

*Start by not driving to work one day each week. Once you have worked that into your schedule, add another day, and then a third and finally each day. By not driving to work everyday you will begin to make a dent in your carbon debt. Besides, buses run whether your riding them or not and worst of all, your paying for them, even when your not using them. So use them.

*Recyling is the easiest and fastest way to reduce your carbon debt and the pollution you add to the planet.

• Newpapers: if you get a daily newspaper, you are killing one tree a month, but by recycling you will prevent another tree from being cut down and reduce the energy required to produce paper from virgin materials. Recycling all paper is just a good idea all around, because the fiber can be reused several times, reducing your energy foot-print, carbon debt.
  To produce each week's Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down and if all our newspaper were recycled, we could save about 250,000,000+ trees each year. More than 1 billion clear-cut trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the U.S.
  If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags, you'd get about 700 of them. A supermarket could use all of them in under an hour! This means in one year, one supermarket goes through 60,500,000 paper bags! Imagine how many supermarkets there are in the U.S.!
• Aluminum: can be recycled indefinitly. Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.
• Steel: Every ton of recycled steel saves 2,500 pounds of iron ore, 1,000 of coal, and 40 pounds of limestone.
• Plastic: Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour and most are thrown away. What a waste!
  Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as buring it in an incinerator or waste to energy facility.
• Glass: Every month, we throw away enough glass, bottles and jars, to fill up a large skyscraper, all of which is recyclable! By recycling, the energy saved recycling just 1 glass bottle can run a 100-watt light bulb for 4 hours and causes 20% less air pollution, 50% less water pollution than a new bottle creates when made from raw materials.
  If all glass were recycled we would save enough energy to run every lightbulb for almost a year and if these bulbs were replaced with compact florecent or diode light bulbs, we could reduce our energy consumption nation wide by at least 15-20%, again depending on a lot of things like, conservation measures, types of bulbs used and source of the electricity.

--It is safe to say, we could shut down several of the worst polluting power plants in the U.S. in the first year if were to recycle everything that is recyclable. In the years following, we could reduce our carbon debt and over all pollution by 25-35% by pushing toward 100% recycling, which is possible, but we have to want it.

*Buy toilet paper made from recycled paper. Why kill a tree to wipe your butt? There's no good argument for it, so buy recycled paper which uses less resources than new paper.

*Why stop with toilet paper, buy recylced paper towels and tissues to blow your nose, if you use them, or better yet, replace them with cloth towels. The reuse of cloth towels will not only save your lots of money, but it will also cut your carbon debt. Most kitchen towels or handkerchief last for years, so figure out how much you spend on paper towels and compare it to a handful of cloth replacements. You'll be surprised at the savings, you do laundry anyway, a couple of small items wont make that much difference.

*Walk more. By not using your car to do everything, your reducing your carbon debt, and besides, it gives you a health benefit too. Europeans on average walk about 10 miles a day. People in the United States on average walk not more than 2 miles a day. That's why we are a Fat Nation. Walk more, reduce your carbon debt and imrpove your health. South American Natives have a saying, 'I never go anywhere without my two doctors, my left-foot and right-foot.' Put your doctors to work for you.

*Buy a compact florecent light. Just start with one or two and put it in a fixture you use a lot. Then, after a couple of months of savign money, get another, and another, and so forth, so by the end of the year you have several installed throughout your home. With each one, you will save 75 to 85% on your lighting bill over regular light bulbs, which for most of us is around half of the electric bill.

*Replace electric toothbrushes and razor with non-electric ones. This will not only cuts your carbon debt, it also cut the energy wasted, the part that eats away at your money slowly, like a slow trickle. Besides, it's only marketing hype that convinced you to buy those things in the first place and there is nothing wrong with non-electric toothbrushes or razors. Don't buy the disposable razors, but the kind that only have to replace the blades, not the whole thing.

*Stop rinsing your dishes before putting them into the dishwasher. It is a complete waste. If you have really greasy dishes, fill a sink with cold water and dish soap. Soak the dishes for several minutes, then without rinsing, put them in the dishwasher and wash as you normally would.

*American throw away 25,000,000,000 styrofoam coffee cups every year.
If your local coffee hang-out doesn't get it yet, get an insulated coffee mug and use it everytime. This will cut back on about 600 to over 1,000 paper / plastic cups you would use each year. It not only saves on cups but every aspect of the getting the cup to the coffee shop: making it, printing it, shipping it and then its waste, getting it to a landfill.
Sit down with the manager / owner of your local coffee shop and show them just how much money they will save and they can also do their part in being green. The math for this is so simple: cost per cup * number of cups used each day = cost per day, then multiply it out for the month and year. (Do some research and find out what it costs for thermal mugs, around $1.85 cents to $2.75 each.) Each themal mug will last at least few years. So, figure how many cups you drink each day, week, month and year and show how if they would give you a mug, they would save a lot of money (cost of coffee cup over two years minus cost of thermal mug = savings). Let the wow factor settle in. Encourage them to give away mugs to their regular custormers, and educate them why their getting a mug. Ask the coffee shop to charge less for refills, half of a regular cup of coffee, and have them add a 10 cent carbon-debt tax to paper / plastic coffee cups, to help discourage their use. If that doesn't work, up the charge to 25 cents and let custormers know they are paying more due to the wasteful practice. Once all the regulars have their own mug, sell mugs at cost to everyone else. Put up a big sign to educate everyone who comes in and to pass the word. Once a few local coffee shops do it, it will spread everywhere.Another advantage, shops will need less storage for all those coffee cups which allows them to buy a bigger volume of coffee, and other things, which can help reduce costs. An added side benefit.

*Plant a trees. Why? The average person in the U.S. uses 7 trees each year in paper products, wood, and other products made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year!
Every tree you plant will help off-set your carbon debt, but you will also have to recycle-newspapers and other paper products. So, how many trees will you need to plant? Not always an easy thing to figure or to come up with, to off-set your carbon debt. You acquire a carbon debt through everything you do, from turning on the water faucet, buying; washing; or drying cloths, buying or preparing food, heating / cooling your home, the paper you use and throw out, turning lights on, driving and so many, many other things we all do every day, including using electric razor or toothbrush. In fact, we add millions of tons to our carbon debt each year. There are general ways to figure your carbon debt and how to off-set it, but they are not acurate all the time. Here is my recomendation: Plant at least two trees per person in your family for 25-40 years. How did I come up with that?
In the United States we are extremely wasteful and each person puts out somewhere between 20 to 45 million tons of carbon each year. It varies where you live and on your life style. It also depends on the types of trees that grow local to your area or if you pay for a tree to be planted somewhere in the world through an online service. Each type of tree offsets your carbon debt differently but it can be said over the life of a tree, you would need to plant more than 25 trees to in-part balance your carbon debt. So many things effect this number, like how much do you conserve and what you do to reduce your overall carbon debt, like recycle and are you just planting trees without making any life-style changes? As we run out of petroleum, we all wont have a choice, and need to cut back on our energy consumption and hence cut back on our carbon debt. So, why not start today, become energy wise and plant trees too.
In a report I read some years back that looked at the amount of oxygen on the planet, as part of a larger report, the numbers were not good. From before the industrial revolution to the mid-ninties, we, through cutting down forests, polluting the oceans and buring coal, oil, wood and natural gas, we have reduced the amount of oxygen on our planet between 35% to 40%. We are breating much less oxygen than our preindustrial ancestors.
Also, remember, we go through a lot of paper in the United States, so planting trees to help offset the amount of wasted paper each person generates would be a really good idea. Planting a tree for every year you are alive will rebuild forests that have been clear cut.
So, to offest your carbon debt and the amount of paper you use will require about 35 to 60 trees per person in your family. Start planting and make the planet a better place, for yourself, your children and grand-children.

*Never pre-heat the oven. It is never required and you can turn the oven on minutes before its needed, put whatever needs baking in and keep and eye on it and just before it is done, turn the heat off, even if its just a few minutes. It has been found the vast majority of baking needs require less baking time and no preheated oven. You'll save, all depending on how much baking you do, around 5-8% on your energy bill.

*Turn your hot water heater to 124 degrees F. There is absolutely no reason to turn it higher. You can also buy an insulating blanket for the hot water heater to help reduce the amount of heat that escapes. The extra insulating will be paid for usually within two or three years, it all depends again on use.

*Install a low flow shower head. They are inexpensive, reduce the amount of water you use, hence reducing the amount of hot water you use, lowering your bills. These often pay for themselves within a couple of years, all depending how people live under the same roof and how well they conserve resources.

*Stop buying bottled water. They are wasteful, with a vast majority of the bottle water on the market being no different than water from the faucet and your paying way too much for it. Instead, buy a water filter for the kitchen sink and not one of those small ones that attaches to the faucet. They work, just not as well as a bigger one that has several layers to it or like a more solid form of carbon, which will do a better job. These filters will cost you around $150 dollars and pay for themselves within a year of two, compared to bottled water, and provide better water than bottled water.
The number of plastic bottles you wont buy will cut your carbon debt, significantly if your drink several bottles each day, all year long. To give you a better idea, most people throw out enough of these plastic bottles each year to make a new coat each year, around 1,550 bottles each year.
Again, this is nothing exact, as it depends on the size of the bottle and how much water you drink and if a bottle is reused by refilling it. This gives you an idea of the volume of waste that is generated by people buying water or soda / pop in plasic bottles each day.

*If your remodeling your house, think about installing on demand hot water heaters for the sinks in your home, bathroom and kitchen. They are expensive as they are not a common thing yet. Using these rather than the main hot water heater will save a lot of money and pay for themselves anywhere from 5 to 10 years, again depending a lot on use.

*For Christmas, use a fake tree. Not buying a real tree will help offset your carbon debt by not having trees cut down that are used for a very short time.

*Educate others! This is the biggest way to cut all of our carbon debt and help others to do the same. Remember, one person is great, thousands is fantatic, but millions is best and will actually begin to make a real difference and positive impact. The goal is for everyone to become as carbon neutral or as close as possible as quick as possible before we end up leaving a dying planet for your grandchildren to inherit.

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