Setting up ‘My Daily Footprint’ Project

I spent this week thinking about what would make sense for the daily footprint project. Here is what I decided:

• to make things as simple as possible
• yet be as detailed and accurate as possible
• to make it easy for anyone else to replicate the experiment
• to document with photos whenever applicable

The 6 main categories of impact I will document are:

• water
• electricity/gas
• food
• garbage (take photos)
• transportation (in miles)
• non food shopping (take photos)

Each category will be divided between activities/consumptions that are:

1. strictly personal
2. parenting related
3. tied to overall functioning of household

That should cover everything. I will also document whatever thoughts, feelings, ideas, come up in the process. That part of the experiment is probably the most important. I will continue the experiment until I feel I have learned as much as I can from it. A second phase will involve quantifying the various types of activities in terms of water use and carbon impact.