LITTLE KNOWN FACTS
Here are a few little known facts about our carbon footprint and how we can reduce it as well as strengthen your heart, melt away fat and improve your overall health while making the world just a bit greener:
- 15% of all trips in the US are less than a mile long and unfortunately, most of them are made by car. Driving 10 fewer miles a week will reduce pollution by more than 500 pounds a year. A walking a mile a day (e.g. to your local store) will help you loose weight and keep you strong and healthy.
- Walking just 30 minutes a day instead of driving will save about 8.4 billion gallons of petrol a year as well as reduce the greenhouse gas emissions by 82 million tons!
- 10,000 people walking five miles a week instead of driving for a year will eliminate the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by 219 cars.
- Walking just three miles a day will burn 240 calories (Snickers bar) and lower your blood pressure and blood sugar levels, which helps prevent diabetes and heart disease.
If you’re still not quite sure whether you can implement these small changes, here are a couple of tips for walking more and driving less:
- Think about the most commonly visited places in your weekly routines (e.g. ATM, post office, convenience stores, friend’s house etc) and find out how far exactly they are located from your home (use internet like google or yahoo maps). If they are under a mile, walk.
- If you live in the country or suburbs, link a few errands together. Then drive to a downtown area, park your car in a central location and walk to do your errands, e.g. go to a bank, hardware store or a shoe store…
- Use a pedometer—studies found that people using pedometer walked at least a mile more each day. The goal is t o walk 10,000 steps a day. The key, however, is to first find out how much you walk on your average day and then increase this number by 20% each week.