Carbon Neutralizing MHS Seniors

After reading Sabrina’s post, I started thinking about a video I once saw on YouTube in which the person offset the carbon emitted by the users watching their videos. So I decided to calculate exactly how many pounds of carbon we’ve used this past year by using our school e-mail.

On average, each girl sends out 5 e-mails per week. Remember, this is an average, so don’t be all “but I don’t send 5 e-mails I week! I send more/less!” Each e-mail takes about 7 minutes to type and send. Around 25 girls actually send e-mails on the school website frequently. That means that individually, we spend 35 minutes a week sending e-mails. All together we spend 875 minutes a week sending e-mails. With around 32 weeks in the school year, that’s 28,000 minutes sending e-mails.

A lot of the e-mails we get are notes to print. As Sabrina mentioned, we take around 65 tests a year, including finals. Each test has an average of 2 sets of notes posted. Printing a set of notes takes around 10 minutes. Posting notes takes around 15 minutes. So, there were around 130 sets of notes total sent out this year (65x2). Each girl spent 1,300 minutes this year printing notes (130x2). On a whole, the grade spent 67,600 minutes printing notes this year. Now, for the scanner girls: On average, 2 girls post one set of notes per test. For all the tests, with one set of notes posted per test, is 375 minutes to post, times 2 because there are two sets of notes which is 1,350 minutes posting notes the whole year for the test. On a whole, we have spent on average 69,550 minutes scanning and printing notes this year.

We also read e-mails. On average we spend 20 minutes a night reading e-mails. An average of 45 girls actually read the e-mails. So that’s 120 minutes a week per girl reading e-mails. On a whole, we spend 5,400 minutes a week reading e-mails. 5,400 times 32 is 172,800 minutes reading e-mails this year.
The night of the cut day we spent four hours on the e-mail which is 240 minutes. Around 45 of us were on the e-mail so on a whole we spent 10,800 minutes on the e-mail that night.

All together:

28,000 minutes sending e-mails.

69,550 minutes scanning and printing notes.

172,800 minutes reading e-mails.

10,800 minutes the night before the cut day on the e-mail.

We spend on average 253,100 minutes on the e-mail this year.

That’s 4,218 hours on the school e-mail. That’s 175.75 days. Wow.

Each computer on average uses 110 watts of electricity per hour. So that’s 463,980 watts of electricity used this year.

In Kilowatts that’s 463.98.

Each kilowatt of electricity uses up 1.35 lbs of carbon.

So we’ve used up 626.373 lbs of carbon this year using our school e-mail.

That’s not so bad considering an average person uses up 23,000 lbs of carbon. But still, it’s a lot. Imagine weighing 626.373 lbs. I know, not cool.

So here’s what we can do. According to http://www.carbonfund.org/, to offset our carbon emissions we can pay $7.03. If we all chip in 15 cents, then we’ll raise enough money to offset our carbon for this year!! Awesome!!! What do you think? (By the way, this is all true. Someone can check my math because I don’t have patience to do it again, but I tried my best… me and my trusty calculator really didn’t have anything better to do, lol).