Use Organic Center’s Nitrogen Footprint Calculator (http://calc.nprint.org/) to measure you own personal nitrogen footprint and see how much new reactive nitrogen your activities are introducing into the global system
Most people are aware of the dangers of releasing CO2 into the environment, but did you know that it is just as dangerous to release too much nitrogen? The human use of nitrogen through agriculture, energy use, and resource consumption has profound beneficial and detrimental impacts on all people. The beneficial impacts include food produced by nitrogen fertiliser. However, in areas that already have a lot of nitrogen, excess nitrogen lost to the environment negatively impacts both people and ecosystems. Once lost to the environment, nitrogen cascades through the Earth’s atmosphere, forests, grasslands, and waters. This excess nitrogen can lead to smog, acid rain, forest dieback, coastal “dead zones”, biodiversity loss, stratospheric ozone depletion, and an enhanced greenhouse effect. This expansive impact makes it important to understand one’s nitrogen footprint.
The Organic Center research team has developed a nitrogen footprint calculator where consumers can input their consumption data to estimate the amount of nitrogen released into the environment by their consumption choices and examine ways to contribute to reducing nitrogen pollution. Small changes in lifestyle choices can have a big effect on your nitrogen footprint and your impact on the environment. The N-Calculator can be used to calculate your personal N footprint, and the N-Institution tool helps universities and other institutions calculate and reduce their nitrogen footprints.
Use The Organic Center’s Nitrogen Footprint Calculator (http://calc.nprint.org/) to measure you own personal nitrogen footprint and see how much new reactive nitrogen your activities are introducing into the global system. As you use the calculator keep an eye out for the pie charts on the left-hand side of the screen. This chart shows your average contribution of new nitrogen to the environment in blue and recycled nitrogen use in green. Notice that as you increase the amount of organic you eat, the less new (blue) nitrogen you introduce to the environment. In short, the greener your chart the better for the environment.
New N refers to reactive nitrogen that was created to grow food. Recycled N includes all existing reactive nitrogen that is being reused to grow food. New N creation increases the total amount of excess reactive nitrogen in the world, while recycled N use does not. Organic production uses mainly recycled N sources whereas conventional production uses mainly new N sources.
After answering the first two questions, a chart will appear on the left. This chart will initially show the average footprint of a person from the country you selected, but as you answer the different N-Calculator questions, it will change to reflect your answers.
