“SSN EDC (Entrepreneurship Development Cell) Presents E-Week 09, Feb 14th to 19th”

GO GREEN! THE WORLD IS OUR BUSINESS!

MY CARBON FOOTPRINT

“Lives of great men all remind us; we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time.” –H.W Longfellow

Do you have any idea about the amount of carbon-di-oxide an individual like you and me generate from our secondary activities? It is a whopping 2.51 tonnes every year for someone like me. This is my Carbon footprint. Not just bigger than my own foot, but is even bigger than the estimated overall average footprint in India (1.20 tonnes), and the world! At this rate, I won’t be leaving behind anything but only carbon footprints on the sands of time! Using the carbon footprint calculator, you can calculate the amount of carbon that you use every year! Before the black foot takes over the world, it high time we went GREEN!

As students, it is time we participated in the “Go Green” initiative, a part of the SSN EDC, E-week programme. This entrepreneurship programme is an ideal platform for all aspiring entrepreneurs to give it a go at their management skills. Go green, does not only involve wearing green coloured clothing to college to show support, but it also involves following certain little things for a greener tomorrow.

Do you know what exactly your Carbon footprint is? It is a measure of the impact our activities have on the environment and in particular climatic change. The factors that affect it don’t just depend on pollutants emitted from vehicles or burning waste (something that we’ve been learning since probably 6^th grade!). It allows us to find out that very simple and day to day activities can cause global warming. Buying local products or organic ones and avoiding meat can cause a significant reduction. Even by getting your laundry done on alternate days or using the train facilities rather than air travel, can help. It is quite common to see youngsters leaving a ‘Be right back’ option on chat messengers when not in use. Avoiding this can help reduce our carbon footprint. It was also found that using ‘Black google’ rather than our usual white background helped save power! Now, that is something!

But what has entrepreneurship got to do with all of this?

Business is a subset of the environment, not the other way around. You can’t have a healthy economy; you can’t have a healthy anything in a degraded environment.

-Peter Coyote

Isn’t this the perfect answer? Any step, or rather any new idea can be converted into a successful innovation only when it gets the right push and proper publicity. On Feb 7^th 2009, NDTV launched its first ever nonstop live programming called the ‘Greenathon’- urging Indians to take a pledge towards a greener tomorrow. This campaign also aimed at raising funds for the ‘Light a billion lives’ project, in association with TERI( The Energy and Resource Institute) to provide solar energy to many villages that have remained without electricity for over a decade. Even HCL (Hindustan Computers Limited) has not been far behind. HCL Technologies joined hands with Carbonfund.org to take forward the ‘Carbon free partner programme’ which has been working on fighting global warming. As a part of this initiative they planted 650 oak trees in 2.8 acres of land in Uttarakhand. Several other institutes and organizations have been actively participating in fighting the affects of greenhouse gases. Standard Chartered Bank and the Isha foundation started the ‘Project Green hands’ and planted 20,000 saplings! A great way to go green!

It is quite evident now, as to how entrepreneurship and initiatives of this sort go hand in hand. The ‘Go Green’ theme has been one of its kinds, here at SSN. It is up to us to take it further and work towards a greener tomorrow. As young entrepreneurs in the making, it would be great if we could adopt certain villages or some part of the city and grow green plantations, or for that matter even maintain parks. Or, we can probably get together and plant saplings in the campus or plant seedlings around to improve the landscape. Rather, for a start, we could make sure that we weren’t wasting electricity in the classrooms. So, what are we waiting for?

Gear up.

Go green folks! The world is our business!!

Sandhya.S
II,BME