Reduce, reuse and recycle. That’s the environmental mantra of years gone by. Nice and to the point.
But do folks really follow it?
I’m sure we do, at least when we’re thinking about it. I’ve been thinking about it lately, so I figured I’d share a few things I do to shrink my footprint… after rambling a bit more. 😉
Short on time? Skip my rambling ↓
Just so we’re clear, I’m not only talking about carbon. I mean footprint in the broader sense of what we consume and what we throw away. Carbon just happens to be a handy proxy for all of it.
And let’s not forget where the phrase “carbon footprint” got its start. Back in 2004, BP (formerly British Petroleum) hired the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather and rolled out one of the first personal carbon footprint calculators, a neat bit of marketing chicanery that attempted to shift responsibility for global warming away from oil companies and toward the consumer — even though oil companies have known since the 1970s that burning their product was heating the atmosphere.
In a Western consumer culture that’s exported around the world, living lighter probably doesn’t move the needle much on its own. However, lowering your impact helps you put your values into practice. Does it make a huge difference? Maybe, maybe not. That mostly depends on how many people live this way. One day in the not-so-distant future, many of us may have no choice. I try not to have a scarcity mindset, but some things are more likely than others.
To keep the worst from happening, things have to change. Change tends to happen in two ways. The first is a small, dedicated group of people convincing more and more people to do things differently. In research by Damon Centola and colleagues, once about 25% of a group committed to a new way of thinking, the other 75% of the group tipped over to it.
The second way, often driven by the first, is law. Laws reined in cigarette smoking and cleaned up our air and water, and an international treaty, the Montreal Protocol, phased out the chemicals that ate a hole in the ozone layer, which is now mostly healed.
There’s actually one more lever: taxes. Governments at every level tax behaviors they want less of, and cut taxes on behaviors they want more of. Of course, that only works when the people setting the agenda aren’t lunatic profiteers.
Who’s got the biggest feet?
Before we get to the list, a little perspective. Where you live and how well off you are matter a lot.
In 2024, the average person on Earth was responsible for about 4.7 tons of CO₂ from fossil fuels and industry. The average American? About 14.2 tons, roughly three times the global average. The average person in China came in around 8.7 tons and growing, and the average person in India around 2.2. Put another way, the typical American burns through an Indian resident’s entire year of emissions in about eight weeks.
Hover over any country, or click the Chart tab to compare countries over time. Source: Global Carbon Budget (2025), via Our World in Data (CC BY).
Those national numbers actually understate things a bit. They only count emissions produced inside each country’s borders. Add the emissions baked into everything we import (phones, clothes, the patio furniture), and the U.S. figure climbs higher still.
None of this is about guilt. People in wealthy countries also have the most room to cut, and usually the most money and options to do it with. That makes them the folks with the most leverage, which is a pretty good position to be in.
Not all American footprints are the same size
“The average American” is a bit of a fiction. Footprints vary a lot inside the U.S. too.
Income, and what that income buys and owns, is the biggest divider. The World Inequality Database counts each person’s footprint from everything they do, buy and own, including the emissions of the companies they own stock in.
The poorest 10% of Americans average about 7 tons a year, almost all of it from simply living: heating the house, getting to work, buying groceries. The middle class comes in around 18 tons and upper-income folks around 37. The top 1%? Nearly 200 tons, about 27 times the poorest 10%.
Where do you land? Here’s a rough guide for a household of three. The Pew Research Center counts you as middle income if your household brings in about $57,000 to $170,000 a year (in 2022 dollars), and Pew’s income calculator adjusts that for your household size and where you live. Below that range, you’re in one of the bottom two bars, and the poorest 10% sit near the poverty line, about $27,000 a year for a family of three (HHS, 2026). Above it, you’re upper income. Breaking into the top 1% takes an income of about $660,000 a year (Tax Foundation), though as you’ll see below, their footprint has more to do with what they own than what they earn. One caveat: the bars sort people by footprint, not paycheck. The two track each other closely, but not perfectly.
In the graph, look at the orange part of each bar. Folks with few or no assets have almost no investment footprint, but by the top 1%, more than two-thirds of the footprint comes from what they own rather than how they live. Go higher still and it gets wild: the top 0.1% average nearly 800 tons a year, more than 80% of it from investments. And if all these numbers look high next to the 14.2 tons above, it’s because they count all greenhouse gases, not just CO₂, plus the emissions from making everything we import.
The takeaway? The bigger your footprint, the more you can trim. Not to say that the wealthy should sell all their assets and become destitute, but maybe consider divesting from fossil fuels, and putting all that money toward things that drive carbon emissions down. We can dream, right? 😉
If your footprint is already modest, the habits below are a nice way to keep it that way (and save some money while you’re at it). And to reiterate, this is a reflection of your values and desires, not a requirement to solve the world’s problems. But by living your values, maybe we solve some problems…
A few ways I reduce my impact
Not that I’m the ultimate guru of living light, but here are a few things I do to reduce my impact AND increase my resiliency in the face of a changing climate.
These “behaviors” are ranked from least costly (FREE! or $) to most expensive ($$$$). Feel free to borrow any of it, and add your own in the comments section! 🙂
FREE! — Donate unused and gently used items. It costs nothing to get rid of stuff you’re not using anymore, so someone else can get some use out of it. In fact, you might make a little money if you get a tax deduction for giving things to charity, or if you sell them online. Both are perfectly reasonable, and I do both. You can even donate (or sell) an old car! Here’s how an old car (and an AI) helped me put more solar on the grid: How One Old Car (and an AI) Helped Put More Solar on the Grid.
FREE! — Reuse plastic, use less of it and recycle it. Zip-top bags get washed and reused. Takeout containers become leftover containers and seed-starting trays. Better yet, always be thinking about how you can avoid plastic in the first place — like asking for paper at the store, or bringing your own bags. I once tracked every bit of plastic I used for a week, and it was eye-opening: 7 Days of Plastic.
$ — Compost. Food scraps make up roughly a quarter of what Americans send to landfills, where they rot into methane, the second-biggest driver of global warming and about 80 times more potent than CO₂ over 20 years. In a compost pile they turn into free fertilizer. My kitchen scraps go straight to the compost pile, then fertilize my garden. The only cost was a bucket to put scraps in, and a bin outside to collect yard waste (leaves, dead plants, etc.) and my kitchen waste. Another benefit of the prior one (reuse, recycle) and this one (compost)… we don’t make much trash at my house! We put our trash out every other week, whereas all the neighbors do it once or twice per week. Sad.
$ to $$ — Grow some of your own food! Even a few tomato plants and a pot of herbs on a balcony count. Every year I write up how my garden did, successes and spectacular failures alike: Climate Victory Garden – 2026. Of course, you can go nuts, turn this into a major hobby, and spend as much or as little as you want. Not only do you get to grow things to eat, but you get outside for some fresh air and work in the garden, which can be very relaxing.
$ — Swap in LEDs. Cheap, easy, and they use a fraction of the power. Bonus: a lower baseline load means your backup power lasts longer when the grid goes down. Install Your Own LED Lights. Of course, you can’t even buy old incandescent bulbs very easily anymore… an example of legislation changing things for the better! LEDs last longer than the old incandescent bulbs, so that’s another savings. And some utilities were, and maybe still are, giving away LED bulbs to their customers.
$ to $$ — Block the sun and the heat. This can be as simple as pulling the curtains you already have during a heat wave to keep the sun from heating the inside of your living space. Or you could buy a motorized shade like the one in the leftmost picture below. That thing paid for itself within a year or two. On summer afternoons, the sun shines directly on my front door. The door turns into a literal heater, radiating heat into the house. It would be like turning on a portable heater in the middle of summer. The shade keeps that from happening. Curtains help keep your house cool in the summer, and keep the heat INSIDE in the winter! Ceiling fans let you set the A/C a few degrees higher without feeling it, and run in reverse in the winter, they push the warm air that collects near the ceiling back down to where you are. A good investment.
FREE to $$ — Catch the rain, use less water. A rain barrel waters the garden for free and gives you a backup water supply in an emergency: Catching Rainwater for Emergency Use. I have seen this be as simple as a bucket under a rain gutter, or as expensive as installing a 20,000-gallon underground cistern.My little rain barrel cost me about $100, and I use it all the time in the garden.
My house has a sprinkler system, so I got a Rachio controller, which connects to a Tempest weather station. I spent about $400 on that about 3 years ago (~$150 for the Rachio and $250 for the weather station), and it has saved me literally tens of thousands of gallons of water by only watering the garden and lawn when they need it — something I appreciate even more lately, as my city just raised the price of water!
$ to $$ — Seal and insulate. Heating and cooling are the biggest energy uses in most homes, BY FAR! A weekend of insulation can pay for itself fast: A Simple Insulation Project. This can be as inexpensive as a can of spray foam or a tube of caulk to seal the air gaps that are stealing your hot or cold air, all the way up to reinsulating your attic.
Not shown: I reinsulated my attic for about $7,000, and it made my house much more livable by leveling out the temperature throughout the house. I’ve been meaning to write about that for a long time, so that story is coming down the pipeline someday soon!
$$$ — Charge the car at home, with sunshine if you can. An EV charged at home beats a gas car on emissions almost anywhere in the U.S. In fact, a lifecycle study by the International Council on Clean Transportation found EVs come out ahead of gas cars even in coal-heavy countries like China and India. Charging from rooftop solar (or a home battery filled by it) makes it better still. I charge my plug-in hybrid daily and only top off my gas tank every few months. I have felt NO pain at the gas pump lately, because I rarely have to go to the gas pump!
Here’s an example from July. I drove 440 miles and used 212 kWh of electricity from the wall. At 14 cents per kWh, that’s about $30. If I assume all the miles driven were electric, that comes out to about 7 cents per mile. Gas at $4 per gallon would be about 11 cents per mile (the car is rated at 35 miles per gallon). However… I get lower-cost electricity on the weekends, AND at least half of that electricity was solar, so it was essentially free! (Or, more accurately, it went toward paying down the solar investment. 🙂 )
The gas tank is half full, the battery is full, and the engine is not running (0.0 rpm).
$$ to $$$$ — Put the sun to work. This can be as simple as buying a solar panel and a SoGen (a solar generator, basically a big portable battery pack), up to a balcony solar setup, and on to whole-house solar. Solar panels and a home battery cut emissions and keep the lights on during outages. Check out our in-depth series on that… start with Why Go Solar?, then see Solar Installation, then Adding Batteries – A Smart Solar Move and the battery settings that saved me the most money.
So there you have it. A few ways to tread a little lighter, from no cost, to low cost, to a serious investment. Put your values into practice, and maybe nudge others a little closer to that all-important 25%. Please share your own tips for lower-impact living in the comments!