About The N-Print Project

Mission Statement:
The overarching purpose of this project is to educate the general public about the causes and effects of nitrogen pollution and illustrate how we each have an impact on nitrogen pollution through our everyday choices.

 

Background

The N-Print project is an internationally supported project, composed of a team of researchers from the United States and the Netherlands. Find out more about the N-Print team. For more information, contact the N-Print team at Allison.Leach @ unh.edu and view publications related to nitrogen pollution and the N-Print project.

Nitrogen pollution contributes to a series of negative impacts to human and environmental health. As the global demand for food and energy grows, nitrogen pollution will also continue to increase. Despite the negative effects already experienced and the extensive research on nitrogen pollution, the nitrogen story has not yet been widely publicized. 

Objectives

The N-Print project also has a broader purpose: to reduce global nitrogen pollution, by using the personal N-Calculator tool as a starting point. The objectives of the overall N-Print project are:

  1. Communicate the importance and effects of nitrogen
  2. Develop tools to calculate the nitrogen footprints of individuals, institutions, and other entities
  3. Promote the reduction of nitrogen footprints through the use of N-Print tools
  4. Assess the contribution of an entity's nitrogen footprint to environmental impacts along with the development of regional nitrogen ceilings
N-Print in Practice

The individual- and institution-level nitrogen footprint tools can then be used to promote the reduction of nitrogen footprints. These N footprint tools can be used in the following ways:

  • To increase awareness of individual contributions to nitrogen pollution in the environment
  • To provide suggestions for reducing individual and institutional nitrogen pollution
  • To show how individual changes in everyday choices or management strategies impact nitrogen pollution
  • To inform institution-level nitrogen footprint reduction targets

The future development of integrated tools that estimate a producer's nitrogen footprint and that links to environmental impacts could be used in the following ways:

  • To determine means for producers to reduce their nitrogen footprints while still maintaining the success of their products in the marketplace
  • To determine emissions ceilings that can be used for the basis of policies limiting nitrogen emissions
  • To predict how nitrogen emissions may be deposited, in what form they will be deposited in, and the ecological and human health associated effects of this deposition

This site provides resources to learn about issues pertaining to nitrogen pollution. The nitrogen footprint tools allows individuals and institutions to calculate and reduce their nitrogen footprints, with the ultimate goal of reducing the global amount of reactive nitrogen released by human activities.