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The growing needs and concerns on the global population pressure have led to a number of initiatives designed to ensure that there is ecological sustainability for human life. According to experts in the field, every person on earth has 4.5 useful areas, this is known as environmental footprint or ecological footprint if you like. This term evolved to describe the impact every human being has on the environment. Amount of garbage an individual generates, car ownership, how regular an individual walks or rides a bicycle, among other things that will help determine the water and land usage are the few aspects that the environmental footprint looks at.

The environmental footprints are mostly used for sustainability education purposes as they are used as tools to show the community how it interacts with the surrounding environment. You can be able to calculate your environmental footprint using sustainability software that is mostly found in lots of websites today. Not only will the calculator give you a total ecological footprint, many websites will even go further to give tips on how one can reduce their environmental footprints based on their lifestyles.

How to shrink the environmental footprint

There are a number of simple steps that anyone can take at home, at the workplace, and in everyday life that will have an effect on the environmental footprint and eventually make it shrink instead of grow. These include:

1. First of all, you should ditch the plastic water bottles and replace them with reusable bottles. While the plastics are durable and many people think they are recyclable, the process uses up a lot of energy which uses huge amounts of fuel to recycle them and the process emits harmful carbon in the air. This simple change can greatly shrink your environmental footprint
2. The other way to shrink your environmental footprint, as advocated by the sustainability software and also through common sense is to always use reusable shopping bags. Many shops today stock-up reusable shopping bags at very fair prices.
3. Purchasing recycled paper products also goes a long way in shrinking your environmental footprint. Today, most companies sell recycled paper products like paper towels, toilet paper, and even paper plates. Needless to mention, this will greatly save the forests. However, even though the products are highly priced, it would be reassuring to know you are contributing your part on conserving environment.
4. Fourth way to reduce the ecological footprint is to support the local producers rather than buying things that have been transported from miles away. The process of transportation in itself unnecessarily pollutes the environment
5. The last way, but certainly not the least that you can shrink your environmental footprint is to plant your own garden if you can. Nothing can be as beneficial to you and to the environment as planting a flower garden, or a fruits and vegetable garden.

All the abovementioned ways of shrinking the environmental footprint are found in basically all sustainability education conferences but the bottom line is everyone should play a role in making the environment more habitable.