Environmental Biology

I am married and my wife and I currently live an apartment. The energy consumed by most of our items we can change to more energy-efficient product. What I found out about the energy consumption of everything in our home is that our appliances cost the most. This was a surprise to me as I never would have guessed that most of what I pay for is in the kitchen, but it makes sense as the fridge is running 24/7. Also, we are fortunate to not have a washer and dryer which I think would increase our energy bill quite a bit. My total was about $113 a month, which is not correct. I may have overestimated on the amount of hours that we use some devices and maybe I fibbed on some of the data collected, but I felt that I had fairly accurate data representation. The electric bill averages about $75 during the summer and $90 during the winter. Looking at my data on phantom loads, I was able to find just about everything by looking at if they still consume power while they are "off"...

Your ecological footprint is unique for each person. It is something that is determined based on every decision we make that would have some sort of effect on the environment; from buying that organic fruit to eating at Burger King. Everyone makes their "footprint" on this Earth, so why not make it as small as possible? Calculation wise, it is important to understand what category of our livelihood makes the most impact. For myself, food and mobility are the top two with food almost doubling mobility. I would need 2.9 Earths and my Earth overshoot day would be May 6th. The calculator itself was very thorough in what it asked for to determine my ecological footprint. Was it accurate? I had to guestimate the transportation portion of the calculator to the best of my abilities, but I believe it is pretty accurate. Just as a thought about overall footprint including at work, we do not recycle anything other than cardboard(which I am a little surprised with how much we use p...