Cars Gone, Bikes On!

Cars+Gone%2C+Bikes+On%21

Faheem Chunara, Contributor

Rising global temperatures, polar ice caps melting, animal habitat damage; we hear this every single day. With more cars and motor vehicles used every day our atmosphere continues to be plagued with Carbon dioxide gas and other Greenhouse gases that always have a harmful effect on our environment and on us. But what can we do to help our environment and will anything we do even have any significant effect? Well that’s what we asked ourselves in our AP Chemistry class.
This month my friends Max Flynn, Duncan Bark, Peter Marcus and I took a survey for our AP Chemistry Project. Our goal was to find out how much of an impact would it make on our environment if every student who lives less 4 miles of school were to bike or walk to school. We surveyed 447 students at CCHS going from classroom to classroom finding out how many students drive to school and how far. Extrapolating this number of students to apply to the entire school our results were:

Total # of students at CCHS 2200
Total # of students that commute by car (less than 4 miles) 756
Total Distance Traveled annually (miles) 1256
Total CO2 Emitted annually (Tons) 326
CO2 Emitted annually if Switch to biking/walking(Tons) 258

 
756 people currently take a car to school when they could feasibly be biking or walking. Most of these people actually travel less than 2 miles which means a small change is quite reasonable.   That means each year we can reduce our CO2 emissions by 68 tons! And that’s just our school, imagine how much of an impact this would have if other students from other schools began to bike or walk.
With more than half of world pollutants coming from cars we cannot afford to ignore this issue. Letting more time pass by will only make things worse. You don’t have to be a superhero to save the planet, because even a small change from you can make a big difference for our planet.