How Big is Your Footprint?

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Alayna Reddick, Staff Writer

If you’re drinking out of single-use plastic right now, you’re adding to your carbon footprint. A carbon footprint is the amount of carbon dioxide and other carbon compounds emitted due to use of fossil fuels by a particular person or group. Your carbon footprint may be growing, but companies are trying to shrink it.

In recent years, major companies have been turning their sails toward a greener tomorrow. In the last few weeks, Pepsi purchased SodaStream for $3.2 billion in hopes of reducing its carbon footprint. SodaStream, a homemade soda making system, can also guide Pepsi to a health-conscious future. Although, this is only the surface of the Pepsi and SodaStream team. They hope to in the future greatly reduce the amount of single-use plastic used, the SodaStream partnership supports this plan.

Other companies have followed the wave of environmental improvement. You may be looking at this article right now on a computer, is it a Dell? Santaluces uses Dell computers in most of its computer labs. Dell has made moves as well to shrink their carbon footprint; starting with their packaging. Wheat straw packaging has become the face of the future for Dell, with it using less power, water, and money to utilize. Material scraps have also been recycled through new programs put in place by the company.

Santaluces has been trying to shrink its carbon footprint by switching to having all FSA testing on the computers. Within the last few years, Santaluces has also begun using Chromebooks which allow for less paper to be used daily in the classroom.