Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

i am doing a project on how to count your carbon footprint if you have any information about the percentages of thing that make up a footprint or anything you think useful please reply

Hi,

Welcome to the science buddies website. Here is some information that can help you get started on your project:

There are a number of websites that can help you calculate your carbon footprint, or the quantity of carbon dioxide (greenhouse gas) that is produced by your choices of food, heating, travel, and other activities. Here are two that include a personal carbon footprint calculator:

http://www.nature.org/initiatives/clima ... alculator/

http://www.cawrecycles.org/living_green ... alculators

You can find other websites by searching for "calculate carbon footprint."

This if a very good topic. For a high school science fair project, you will want narrow the scope of your investigation and try to think about a specific question that can be answered by doing an experiment. For example, you can measure your carbon footprint by comparing tons of carbon dioxide produced by various modes of transportation from home to school. Or compare the carbon footprint of various high school lunch choices. Are you going to believe the carbon dioxide emissions provided on the websites? Perhaps you want to investigate and verify that the numbers posted are correct. Or, maybe you would want to invent a new portable device for measuring carbon dioxide. The possibilities for doing an original research project are endless, but for a successful project you should spend some time looking through these websites and reading other background information until you understand the topic thoroughly, and do try to do a unique experiment.

Good luck!


Donna Hardy

I am doing a science project on carbon footprinting. I have a long time to this project 3 months to be exact, but I need to get started very soon. I have looked and reasearched many calculations for this. If I were to do the effects of the average house holds carbon footprint, would this be too broad? Should I do it just on one area such as average meals or vehicals and how this affects the earth? I know it had been posted that I need to test a specific area. Also I would like to know if putting the percentages into global hectacres would this be good? Is this a too broad topic for science fair? because I have seen websites that base your percentages on global hectacres and how many there are per person to have based on the earth. I would appreciate some feed back to point me in the right dirction, Thanks!


Niki Lambert

Hi Niki!
In the future, please start a new thread of your own. Anyways, for your project, I definitely agree that you want to test a specific area. This means that perhaps you could look at certain aspects of daily life which contribute most to the carbon footprint, perhaps vehicle emissions or some other area. Here's a helpful link on global hectares-
http://www.eea.europa.eu/highlights/Ann1132753060
If you could gather together enough data to measure in terms of global hectares, that would be amazing, although I'm not sure that you'll be able to gather quite enough data for that. Good luck!

Nice Topic!
When I took AP Environmental Science, I personally loved the subject because of it's relativity to our current problem we face in society. Now as we get more aware of the issues with global warming, I find it imperative to research on information as you are doing.

Anyways for the information:
Many people are unaware of just how much carbon footprints they leave on our very vulnerable planet. Production of oil, coal, plastics, crops, and even basic activities like driving and cooking introduce a significant amount of carbon into the atmosphere.

To calculate your carbon footprint you may want to check out:
http://www.conservation.org/act/live_gr ... print.aspx

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissi ... lator.html

Also, I strongly suggest watching the documentary of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" it explains a lot about our planet and our connection to the increase in carbon trends over the past years.