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This goes out to our fellow classmates, other students, teachers and any other individuals that wish to personally educate themselves in developed practices to minimize personal footprint and utility use. We as students and aspiring scientists learn to collect valuable information as such to compile it into suitable form to be presented to others that wish to understand these findings. An individual’s footprint can be broken down into various forms that can be practiced and improved over time and with gathered knowledge from controlled studies.

Improving the bulb of choice from an incandescent can benefit your wallet and our earth in the long run. If we can stop wasting so much energy on insufficient bulbs, we can bring down some of our unnecessary uses. Our population has definitely thrown away its fair share and more of trash and we must bring our recycling efforts into full effect. Learning how to recycle our waste better than we normally do can help organize our recyclables to be repurposed and reused. Next to recycling, water use is extremely important, as a valuable resource that we already use plenty of on a daily basis we must learn to ration and minimize our daily consumption. Water consumption can be monitored and minimized with practice and various tools today can help minimize amounts needed and prevent any wasted water. The appliances we use daily don’t just power themselves, but we can learn to use them in moderation and practice with more efficient appliances. In addition, reducing the amount of miles we travel in our own automobile and using more environmentally friendly alternatives to travel will help reduce the impact we make on earth.

` There are many other ways to improve our impact besides these above. Our footprint depends on how we choose to live the way we do with our world and that we learn to do so in a more appropriate manner to take good care of our planet. Personal footprint is a lifestyle choice to be mindful about we are doing with our resources and learning how to utilize them in their most efficient forms.

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Andrew Pardoe- (Energy Light and Heating)

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Andrew Pardoe- (Energy Light and Heating)

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Sometimes we might wonder where to even begin in reducing our personal impact and acquiring new more efficient light bulbs can be an easy start. You may wonder if you’ll even notice the difference and you will notice the difference in your pocket, and you will be helping your earth at the same time. By using led bulbs rather than standard incandescent bulbs you can reduce the amount of bulbs your throwing away and reduce what your paying to light up your house each month and can have greater results when observed annually. Along with improving your lighting expenses led bulbs are much more efficient at being recycled and have a better opportunity to be repaired and reused with new materials compared to standard bulbs that would have to be thrown away after they go out.

I was able to cut back on wasting electricity by leaving lights on or off if I knew I would be turning them back on before too long or not. I have already replaced my light bulbs with LED bulbs to be most efficient with my lighting use. I usually work a lot outside or at the gym or bill millers so I end up having to shower quite a bit and that can become expensive over long periods of use. When I was able to minimize my hot shower use I was able to see significant difference in my power usage throughout the week. My visual explains an easy way to replace your bulbs with new more efficient bulbs that will save you a fair amount of money in the long run and some bulbs can be repurpose and or fixed to be reused rather than being completely broken down to be repurposed.

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One way that I was able to reduce my ecological footprint in terms of my water usage was planning and timing. Before starting this project, I would just hop in the shower and not think about how much time I spent in there or how much water I used. When doing this project, I started to time my showers which made me very self-aware of how much time I spent in the shower and how much water was being used. My showers used to range anywhere from 10-15 mins, and I was able to reduce the time down to between 5-8 mins. The average number of gallons used when taking a shower is 2.1 gallons per minute, so cutting down just one minute could make a huge difference. Just in my three days of cutting down my showers I was able to save 33.6 gallons of water. When I would wash my hands, I was also able to cut down how much water I used to by singing my “ABC’s" which was something my teachers in elementary school growing up would tell us to do also. When brushing my teeth, I used to leave the water running the whole time even when the toothbrush was in my mouth. While working on this project I realized that if I only turned on the water when I needed to rinse my toothbrush and rinse out my mouth, I would be able to save a lot of water. The planning part took place when it came to washing my clothes. Knowing what clothes, I needed for the whole week and washing larger loads instead of washing 3 items of clothes everyday helped save a lot of water also.

Most of the changes I stated like reducing your shower time, turning off the water when brushing your teeth and timing when you wash your hands are very easy way to reduce a person ecological footprint. One thing I would say may be challenging is remembering to do these things. All of the things stated are things we do on a daily basis which turn into habits after doing them for so long. Trying to change a habit that is already made can take a lot of time and every time you do it you have to be conscious that you are trying to reduce your footprint. One way I would recommend to a friend to reduce their water usage with their ecological footprint is to track everything. Writing down how long your showers are every day and how much water you use will keep you mindful and that way you can see your improvement over time.

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1. Some of the easy changes to reduce my ecological footprint by reducing my waste production were bringing reusable bags whenever going out to shop. Plastic bags or even multiple paper bags do add up quickly with numerous visits during the month or even depending on how much you are purchasing. Bringing your own bags is so simple and effective at reducing waste. Another easy change for reducing my waste was shopping locally like farmers markets where more product is accessible with less packing/no packaging. Reducing the amount of plastic you buy when purchasing a product is an easy change to help reduce your waste production.

2. The most difficult change for me was actually finding what I wanted in waste free packaging. Most things now a days are packaged for convenience, but that comes at a cost environmentally for waste buildup.

3. The most impactful task for reducing my ecological footprint was using making use of recycling bins where available and disposing of non recyclables properly as well. Just the simplest things like just participating in disposing of your waste properly makes a huge difference environmentally with how your waste ends up after you're done with it.

4. I would recommend to just stop buying as much as you normally do. This is actually the easiest way to reduce your waste. Only purchase things that you ACTUALLY NEED, and not things that you just want.

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• What were some easy changes you made to reduce your ecological footprint during the project?
Some easy changes I made was making sure all of the lights were turned off if I were not using them. Turning off all game systems and TV’s if I were not using them at that moment. Also picking one day to do all of my laundry and trying to wash clothes in larger loads instead of multiple small loads throughout the week.

• What changes were difficult? A difficult change for me was cutting down the amount of time I spend on my game systems and watching television. It was easy to turn it all off if I were not really paying attention to it, but it was difficult to find other things to do in order to cut down on my usage.

• Which changes were the most impactive in terms of reducing your ecological footprint? One of the biggest changes that was hard at first but ended up having a big impact was completely unplugging my mini fridge in my room and moving all of my stuff to the large refrigerator. I did not realize how much energy that was using and I was surprised to see the difference.

• What would you recommend to a friend as a sustainable and feasible way to reduce their ecological footprint? An easy one that I would recommend would be to just turn off all of the lights and appliance that they are not using at the time in order to save energy. We commonly forget to turn off lights and TV’s and do not realize how much energy that is wasting. That was one of the easiest changes for me.

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While using my automobile, I tried any option to reduce my ecological footprint with it. The simplest change I achieved was by carpooling with friends to school and taking public transportation for the first time. This allowed me to not only decrease my ecological footprint, but I was able to socialize with friends after a stressful day and focus on my social life for a while rather than stressing about school. In regards to public transportation, I was able to explore San Antonio more and see how other people are also making an effort to reduce their ecological footprint. They were concerned about their environment as well, and I ended up having many conversations with other passengers about the advantages of taking this mode of transportation. On the other hand, not all changes with this component were easy to obtain. Some problems did arise, but I was somehow able to fight through it. One situation that would come up quite a bit was time management between transportation methods. For example, my friend would arrive at my house, but I would still need more time to finish getting ready or finish eating. In addition, public transportation has certain time frames that only allow for certain stops to happen. This would result in major problems as my destination would not be in route and/or times were not available when I got out of school. I would have to call someone to pick me up which made me feel really bad for making them drive all the way downtown to my house that is located about 30 minutes away. Despite the challenges I faced with going on public transportation or carpooling with friends, I did find it more beneficial to have carpooling as my top option. I found myself driving less miles with my vehicle or vise versa when giving a friend a ride, and I found that to be very successful in reducing my ecological footprint. As a recommendation to reducing one’s ecological footprint, I advise one to take a look at the harmful chemicals that are already surrounding the air and think twice before driving their own car everywhere. Carpool, safely take as many people as you can in one car to get to a destination, and I can guarantee that the ecological footprint will slowly begin to decline and make the earth a cleaner and sustainable place to live.

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Karina Martinez Automobile Summary Graph