How To Reduce Your Carbon Footprint: 5 Tips

How do I reduce my carbon footprint?

1) Insulate your home

With the weather getting increasingly chillier by the day, it is important to wrap up and stay warm. While putting the heating on is often a necessity in winter, make sure you are properly insulating your home before doing so.

The last thing you want is to be wasting energy (and money) heating your home only for most of the warmth to escape through draughts and lack of insulation. Next time you feel the urge to crank up the boiler, check that your house is fully draught-proofed.

Another thing you ought to consider is the age of your boiler. If your current tank is more than 15 years old, it’s worth thinking of a replacement as older models can be significantly more wasteful.

Are you currently using solar or wind power in your property? We strongly recommend exploring the capabilities of eddi, our state-of-the-art energy-saving device, which diverts surplus power from such sources and uses it to heat your water and rooms.

2) Changing your diet to reduce your carbon footprint

Veganism has been a huge discussion point in recent weeks, what with Piers Morgan’s highly publicised sausage roll outrage and the new McDonald’s vegan Happy Meal.

Tesco labelled veganism the “fastest growing culinary trend of 2018 with the percentage of vegans increasing tremendously in the last 12 months, so much so that large companies such as Greggs and McDonald’s are having to update their menus.

But what effect does eating meat have on your carbon footprint, we hear you ask?

University of Oxford researchers recently discovered that cutting meat and dairy products from your diet could reduce your carbon footprint from food by up to 73%.

Meat and dairy account for 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions, while the meat industry has caused substantial deforestation across the world. Not to mention the fact that livestock emissions from fertiliser and methane-based cow waste make up between 14.5% and 18% of total global greenhouse emissions.

Those looking to reduce their carbon footprint when it comes to food should also set a New Year’s resolution to buy more locally produced products. It may seem easy to eat food that has travelled half-way across the world to make it to your plate, but transported goods are a massive contributor to global warming.

3) Reduce your carbon footprint while driving

Need your car for work and other commitments? Changing how you drive can still tremendously reduce your emissions. For instance, speeding and unnecessary acceleration can reduce your miles-per-gallon by 33%.

This year, try to be warier of how you use your vehicle. Seemingly little things like avoiding sitting in traffic (by taking alternate routes or driving outside of rush-hour), combining errands (to reduce back-and-forth trips) and ensuring your tyres are properly inflated all contribute to reducing your carbon footprint when travelling.

If you do need a vehicle but want to significantly reduce your ecological footprint, we recommend driving an electric car, which studies show are able to cut greenhouse gas emissions by half. Combine this with zappi, our new intelligent electric car eco charging point, and you will significantly reduce your carbon footprint in no time at all.

5) Recycle more

An obvious tip but one we could not leave out: recycling. Thanks to recent technological advances in recycling technology, it has never been easier to ensure you are conserving resources when it comes to waste.

Are you recycling as much as you should be? Did you know, for example, that a staggering 1 billion Christmas cards will end up in bins each year? That’s the equivalent of 33 million trees! This year, why not use recyclable Christmas cards as a simple way of carbon offsetting.

In terms of household waste, make sure you have two bins in your home for recyclables and non-recyclables, and do your research on what items belong where. If you are ever in doubt, refer to one of the many recycling guides available online.