The Frid family drives a Toyota Prius and an electric vehicle. They eat a mostly vegetarian diet, with no red meat, and they don’t fly off on annual vacations.
Ursula Frid, however, wanted to know how her family could do even better in terms of reducing their output of fossil fuel emissions, so she used the Island Pacific School science fair as an opportunity to find out.
“I found out that by walking on the ferry, instead of driving on, we could theoretically reduce our emissions from ferry travel from 6.38 tonnes annually to 1.61 tonnes. Of course, this is an estimate as we don’t have up to date data from BC Ferries about the Queen of Capilano’s fuel consumption,” says Ursula.
“I also learned that burning 1.5 chords of wood, which is what our family would normally go through in a winter, is equal to driving 30,000km in the family’s Toyota Prius.”
With this in mind, Ursula’s dad, Leo, who works from home, has cut way back on his wood burning.
“I used to start a fire in the morning when I went to work in my home office,” says Leo. “This winter, I would just start a fire occasionally.”
Obviously, the family stands by Ursula’s data, but both Leo and Ursula say that wood burning is probably one of the more complicated and controversial sources of emissions.
