Your ecological footprint is described as how much land and resources are required to sustain your lifestyle. Lots of things factor into your ecological footprint: your diet, transportation, housing, and even what sorts of consumer products you buy.

To better understand what I am getting at in this article, take five minutes and take the Earthday.org Footprint Calculator Quiz. Your results are calculated as a number of planet Earths that would be needed to sustain the world’s population with your lifestyle.

I’ll give you an example. I’d consider myself a pretty green person. I rarely eat animal products, I don’t commute a whole lot, I don’t use a whole lot of consumer products, and I recycle and reuse whenever possible. My result? Scary. Four and a half planets. Let me explain what goes into this calculation in a bit more detail.

Your diet plays a much larger role in your effect on the planet than you realize. The consumption of meat and animal products make up over 50 percent (about 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide) of emissions worldwide annually. Those emissions come from all of the resources needed to raise the animal, process the byproducts, and transport the meat and animal products. Going vegan for a year would have as much effect as switching from a gasoline powered car to an electric vehicle for the same amount of time.

Not to mention, agriculture accounts for almost 90 percent of the US’s water consumption. The production of one pound of beef requires 2,500 gallons of water, a pound of eggs costs 477 gallons of water, almost 900 gallons of water are needed for one pound of cheese, and 1,000 gallons of water are required for a gallon of milk.

Livestock operations cover about 45 percent of the land on earth, and are the leading cause of water pollution, biodiversity extinction, and local ecosystem habitat destruction.

I’ve been a vegetarian for a while, but the film, Cowspiracy, inspired me to try veganism for a lot of different reasons. I have been avoiding animal products as much as possible, and I’ve been eating a mostly plant-based diet for a while now.

Next time you are at the grocery store picking up some milk and eggs, just consider all of the resources that went into those products that are so easily at your disposal.

Another factor you probably don’t consider is your waste production and consumption of goods and materials. Once you throw something no longer needed into the garbage, chances are you don’t think about it again. Well, it’s got to go somewhere, right? Most of Americans’ waste ends up in landfills that are causing all sorts of problems. Eventually landfills leak, and contaminate groundwater and ecosystems. Burying our problems won’t work! The worst part is that the waste management companies are only responsible for a landfill for 30 years. After that, it’s on its own. While incineration seems like a better alternative, it releases all sorts of horrible toxins and emissions when waste is burned. The average American creates about 4.3 pounds of trash every day. Do the math. That’s almost 1600 pounds a year – per person! About two thirds of that waste is organic material that can be composted.

Don’t even get me started on plastic. You can read a whole article I wrote about it here.

Transportation quite literally drives a big part of your eco footprint. What type of car your drive? How far do you commute? Do you carpool? Do you use public transportation? How often do you fly? These are all elements to examine when looking at the transportation portion of your eco-footprint.

With electric vehicle technology evolving and advancing, and the community rapidly growing, EVs are the way of the future and are cutting everyday transportation emissions from many people’s footprint.

Flying was recently named, “Your Biggest Carbon Sin” by NY Times. A flight from New York to Europe has the same effect as emitting 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person. Since flying is such an enormous industry, and there aren’t a whole lot of alternatives for long distance travel, that kind of leaves us at square one.

While there are so, so, so many elements that go into your impact as you walk this planet, these are just some of the more recognizable culprits. I hope this article inspires someone to change their impact on the environment for the better.