Our Community Carbon Footprint

  As a community, our continued use of finite resources takes it toll on the environment not just within our town borders, but also around the world. How do you garner support from our residents, town government, and businesses to promote sustainability and environmental awareness?

  Sustainable Braintree started out as a small group of concerned residents, who wanted to reduce their own impact on the environment while maintaining a quality lifestyle. We believed that climate change is a real and an urgent issue for which all citizens are responsible even as governmental inaction on all levels prevailed. One year later, momentum has been building within Sustainable Braintree, town government, and other organizations to make a difference – a difference we hope will make our community a leader in energy conservation, renewable energy, recycling, and many other sustainable benefits to our community.

  Among our other efforts, we strongly felt that to develop a community wide strategy for significant reductions of energy, we first had to determine our carbon footprint. What is a carbon footprint? It is one way to estimate our impact on the environment by measuring the carbon dioxide emitted by our energy use. Carbon dioxide is one of at least six pollutants implicated in global warming and climate change. We wanted to know how much carbon dioxide, generally referred to as carbon, was emitted from our electricity use, burning fuels for comfort heating, fuel burned in our vehicles, and waste disposal. For our community carbon footprint, we looked at 2009 energy usage because we were able to elicit the invaluable assistance from the Mayor’s Office, the School Department, the Tax Assessor, BELD, and National Grid. We also used energy conversion factors from the US Department of Energy, the USEPA, and Census Bureau.

  Here’s what we found.  

12,065 tons of carbon from the town government sector. 

403,720 tons of carbon from the residential sector. 

777,016 tons of carbon from the commercial/industrial sector. 
 

1,192,800 total tons of carbon for our community.

or

2,385,600,000 lbs of carbon for our community. 

  That’s right, our community of 11,000 households, 35,500 registered vehicles, 1,300 businesses, and supporting town government emitted over two billion pounds of carbon in 2009. Imagine what the other 349 cities and towns in our state are also emitting. Now you can see how this easily escalates into a regional, even a global issue, needing individual and collective talent and imagination within all communities to create real solutions. 

 Here are some other interesting facts: 

• The commercial/industrial sector is the largest carbon emitter in our community (66% of all emissions). Comfort heat from this sector alone represents 85% of this sector’s emissions.

• The residential sector is the second largest emitter in our community (33% of total emissions). Residential driving (65%) represents the single dominating emission source followed by comfort heat (31%) and electric use (13%).

• The government sector represents only 1% of the total carbon emissions in our community. It is analogous to being a large business. The main sources were electric usage (55%) followed by comfort heat (36%). The largest municipal emitter is the school department (64% of the total) simply because of the number and size of buildings it maintains.

 Because this is our first town carbon footprint. It represents an effort to establish a baseline to compare our community’s future efforts toward sustainability. Working with town government, Sustainable Braintree will use this and future reports to gauge our community’s progress moving toward a more sustainable and quality lifestyle.

 Help us in our efforts. Be sure to put us on your calendar. Our community meeting is January 13^th at 7 PM in Town Hall. Our second annual Green Gala will be held at the Braintree Sheraton on January 24^th at 7PM to raise funds for Sustainable Braintree’s community and outreach efforts in 2010. Go to www. sustainablebraintree.org for more information and also download a copy of the 2009 Carbon Footprint Summary.  

 Robert Fricke

 Sustainable Braintree, Inc.

 2010 Energy Task Force Chairperson