Boring as it may seem, I’m actually quite keen to figure out how to reduce my carbon footprint.

Project Neutral who is located in the same building as Organic Lifestyle, just released their annual survey to help you assess your current footprint.

How their calculator differs from other carbon footprint calculators I’ve seen is that they take your lifestyle choices eg., vegetarian, invested in a rain barrel or backyard gardening into account.

They can also get the info for gas, water and hydro use directly from the providers with your permission – helpful in the event, you can’t find all the old bills and add them up (In my case, I found bills for a representative month and averaged it out to give me a guesstimate)

In about 25 minutes, I found out that I’m an eco-sumberer whose biggest offenders are driving and air travel

However, the thing I really liked is the option to create a personal challenge to reducing your household’s target

eg., If I wanted to become 100% carbon neutral, I need to look at taking more public transportation, offsetting energy use and air travel to start. Those are reasonable efforts and allows me to understand the impact I’m having and how can reduce it.

However as a goal, I think its best to start with something realistic – eg., we all can commit to reducing our carbon footprint by 10% this year right?

Project Neutral offers links to incentives plans and great tips on how to reduce your impact (eg., Did you know there are incentives to install ceiling insulation?)

Climate change is here – I feel all we can do is to try and slow down the fall

I hope that this inspires you to take the survey yourself and be part of the change we want to see in the world, together.