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| Recycling one aluminum pop container saves enough energy to run a television for three hours. | |
 Ecological Footprint Exercises |
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How many un-crushed aluminum pop containers fit in a plastic garbage bag? In 2003, Albertans recycles enough aluminum cans to circle the earth. The Earth's diameter at the Equator is 12,756 km and the height of a can is 12 cm. How many cans did Albertans recycle in 2003? Using your answer from the first exercise, how many bags full of cans is this? By recycling one aluminum pop can, we save 0.5 kwh (Kilowatt-hours) of electricity. Tha's enough to light a 100 watt bulb for five hours, or power an average laptop computer for 11 hours. How much electricity is saved in a bag of cans? Each month, the average Canadian home uses 300 kwh of electricity. How many recycled cans does it take to save enough energy to power a home for a month? In 2003, how many homes could Albertans power by their aluminum pop can recycling effort? |
How reducing your ecological footprint can help endangered species.
When you walk along a sandy beach at low tide, it’s easy to see your footprints. But if you come back the next day, all the proof has vanished, swept away by the tide. The footprints on the beach may be gone, but we leave another kind of footprint behind that doesn’t wash away. It’s a footprint we leave behind as we live our lives on the Earth, one not so easy to see, but you can be sure that it’s there.
When you are working at your computer, notice how much space it takes up on your desk. The space it sits on is sometimes called its “footprint”, because it represents where it “stands”, just as our footprints indicate where we stand.
Everything on the planet uses space to live. It’s not just the space occupied by our size “13” shoes, it’s the space we use to grow food, to sleep, to go to school, and to have a cold drink in the mall on the weekend. It all adds up.
When planners consider how to design better cities, they think about the needs of all the citizens and try to find space for everything. Staff at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Community and Regional Planning studied this problem, and went even further. They figured out a way to plan the space so that a community of people could exist without taxing the Earth’s resources.
They determined the space needed for an individual to sustain himself. That includes living space, land to grow food, forests to produce paper and process carbon dioxide, roads to get around on, the land needed to dispose of garbage, and many more factors. They calculated how much of our planet an individual needs to exist. They called this our “ecological footprint”.
The UBC team came up with ways of calculating the ecological footprint for a country, community, or individual. These models revealed that Canadians, on average, need about 7 or 8 hectares of land each to sustain their lifestyle. Compare this with the average Brazilian, who needs 2.6 hectares, or a Nigerian, whose ecological footprint is about 1.3 hectares. Our American neighbours use an average of 12.2 hectares each.
The amount of biologically productive land (and ocean) available to support life is about 1.9 hectares per person. The ecological footprint of our species has been calculated at 2.3 hectares for every human on the planet. The difference between what the Earth has and what people need, is called the “ecological deficit”. This shortfall means we’re either using too many resources per person, or there are too many people. If we allow for the ecological footprints of the other 30 million species we share the place with, we realize that the Earth is overworked.
Right now, each Canadian is using more than 3 times as much space as the average human on the planet. We have a responsibility to reduce the size of our ecological footprints.
How can you reduce your ecological footprint? RECYCLE!
