CARBON FOOTPRINT: A GLOBAL ALARMING

CARBON FOOTPRINT: A GLOBAL ALARMING

Globalization is inevitable as we reside in a “Global village”. As the globalization progresses, it is becoming a threat to the society and its human life as well as all the living creatures including the green life. As the effect of globalization several technologies are begetting to make ease of life but there is nothing to be hilarious in this technological progress because this supplies lots of carbon-di-oxide in the society which is an obvious threat to the living life. Thus Environment protection, Global warming and Climate change are most priority to everybody----nations’, companies’, individuals’. The word that is becoming a giant to these all effects is “Carbon Foot print”. Therefore reduction of carbon foot prints is prime concern to media, government and business world especially, when we perceive global environment in the context of post-Kyoto scenario.

“Carbon footprints” can be defined as the measure of the impact of the human activities leave on the environment, directly and indirectly or is accumulated over the life stages of a product, in terms of the amount of the green house gases produced, measured in units of carbon-di-oxide. In other words ‘carbon footprints’ is the total amount of carbon-di-oxide and other green house gases, emitted over the full life cycle of a service or a product. It is expressed as the grams of carbon-di-oxide equivalents. This established method has been standardized under ISO 14044.

Carbon is the essential component of all the fossils fuels ------oil, petrol, gases, coal; and as we have become already dependent on these fuels, every time we are using these fuels carbon-di-oxide, a green house gas, is evolving and concentrating the percentage of carbon-di-oxide into the atmosphere which results the global warming and climate change in a jiffy manner. It is already now 370 ppm from its early 280 ppm after the industrial revolution. If we do not hold the rein of this prolific increase of carbon-di-oxide then it will grab the whole earth in ere long. Already experts say that if we use these fuels in this manner without modulating its behavioral then the concentration of this green house gas will exceed 700 ppm by this century ending. According to experts it would lead to increase in temperature by 1.4 to 5.80, which in turn will cause the frequent change in climate and weather.

The carbon foot prints can be effectively reduced by applying the following steps:
1. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to accurately determine the current carbon footprint
2. Identification of hot-spots in terms of energy consumption and carbon-di-oxide emissions
3. Energy and resources conservation is the major way to reduce carbon footprints. Reduce, Reuse and Recycle can be the best process to minimize the carbon foot prints.
4. Identification of the solutions that neutralize the emitted carbon-di-oxide thus carbon-di-oxide eliminated by any production process can be minimized.
5. Educated employees and general public must cultivated the habit of eco-friendly nature in their own day to day life so by this way carbon footprints can be lessened.
6. Last but not the least step includes carbon offsetting; this can be achieved by using bio-fuels and tree planting, tree planting is the best way to reduce carbon-di-oxide from the atmosphere since tree absorbs carbon-di-oxide and reuse and recycle it to produce oxygen and thereby all we can minimize our carbon foot prints by doing a project “one man, one plant” to save our earth and our own life.