My partner and I are vegetarian, recycle and compost as much as we can, and lease an EV but as renters, we struggled to identify other steps we could take to reduce our environmental footprint. We also know these actions help save a lot of precious resources and emissions so we wanted a way to quantify the environmental benefits of our current actions.
The Fremont Green Challenge has been a great resource to identify renter-friendly actions and track our progress and financial savings. So far, we have reduced 17.7 tons of carbon! Since joining the Fremont Green Challenge, we realized our biggest impact on the environment is in the transportation sector. I grew up on the east coast and my partner’s family lives in India. Flying to visit family and friends not only costs money but bears a huge environmental burden, releasing tons of greenhouse gases. Since we will continue to visit our families, we learned through the Fremont Green Challenge that we can offset the carbon emitted from our air travel. We quantified the amount of emissions our flights from 2017 released and donated to COTAP, a non-profit based in Oakland that counteracts carbon emissions through certified carbon sequestration forestry projects in developing countries. We are excited to keep using the Fremont Green Challenge to reduce our carbon footprints, and we are now working on taking the train more and combining trips. The Fremont Green Challenge platform allows renters like me to learn about easy actions we can take to reduce carbon and help our City reach its climate action goals.
