Instructions for using the EPA "events" calculator to measure the footprint for your Church's Sunday worship service

Firstly, open the online events calculator in another window and then return to this page. You can then switch between the calculator, and this page to get instructions for each question (click here for the calculator)

If you think the questionnaires will be helpful, download them, otherwise click start now on the calculator

Enter your church's name and location, and the date you are measuring (all optional), and select "Event Results" then "start now"

1. Type of event: "conference" is probably closest, just make sure you choose the same one each time you do the calculation.

2. How many patrons: This is how many people attended worship on the day in question.

3. The event runs for one day (less really, but it doesn't matter)

4. Ground area. Include all of the area in your church which is involved on the day: the worship space, toilets, kitchen, sunday school rooms, foyer etc. And outside, car parking space, any area where people mill around.

5. inside area will be for you to guess. For life of building, they suggest 80 years if you don't know. PLaces which have old church buildings and newer halls will have to improvise. Just make sure the guess stays the same if you repeat the footprint assessment again (to compare summer and winter footprints, or to see how much you have improved since last year).

6. should be 100 - inside %. Why they don't just work that out for you I don't know!

7. Probably not relevant unless you have a marquee for a special worship service.

8. select yes then fill in the amount of power. This is measured by the first person who arrives taking a power reading, and the last to leave doing likewise. Or, if another service starts before or after, you will have to work out a reasonable and consistent way of measuring.

9. Take a water reading before and after church, as above. Notice this is KILOlitres, but the calculator (as of 11 Dec) wont let you enter a value less than 1! So if your reading is less than 500l, I guess put zero.

10. No

12. Fill in according to an estimate of what people provide for supper before/after worship. Ie if someone makes a cake, you might decide it was worth $10 even though the church didn't actually pay for it.

13. The paper handling part of the footprint isn't very satisfactory. Hopefully they will update it, or you can use the office calculator to get a better set of questions around paper (for the order of service in particular). Choosing 13a to represent the order of service at least lets you enter recycled content.

14. SKIP THIS ONE (See 15)

15. Here you fill in how far people traveled to get to worship. Record bus & train under public transport, not (d) or (e).

16 SKIP THIS ONE

17. Again, it is either 240L, or zero, for waste. I really hope you generate less than one 240L bin at worship, unless your congregation is huge :-)!

You now have your results!

They can be cut and pasted into a word document with fair success.

You can also click on "target footprint" to start a discussion around what percentage reductions you will try to achieve in order to get a more reasonable footprint.

Once you have your results, please send the TOTAL footprint, and footprint per delegate, to jason@ecofaith.org for inclusion on the results page of Sunday worship footprint project (this will change in 2008).

PLEASE, if you can, first go to GoogleEarth, locate your worship centre form a height of about 2km, and save the image. Then use a paint program to superimpose the actual footprint of your congregation's Sunday activities. For examples, see our previous results.

Hopefully, from here you will be able to encourage your congregants to measure their own footprints (and reduce them), as well as the footprints of your entire Sun-Sat operations in your worship centre.