Following the recent Earth Overshoot Day, anything the country uses for the rest of the year — from energy to heat homes to the food people eat — is depleting the earth’s resources at an unsustainable rate.

The Global Footprint Network, an international environmental monitoring organisation, has estimated it would take an area of land 35 times the size of Hertfordshire to provide all the resources the county consumes and deal with all the waste it produces each year.

This stark warning is based on calculations of Hertfordshire residents’ ecological footprints. An individual’s footprint is an estimate of how much of the world’s resources they consume, including how many crops they eat, how much is needed to feed the animals they consume, the area of sea which produces the fish they eat, as well as the amount of land taken up by their house and how much forest area is needed to absorb the CO2 emissions from their car and home.

The ecological footprint is measured in ‘global hectares area’ (gha), because the resources we use come from all over the world. If the total of the earth’s productive surface area is divided by the world’s population, each person’s ‘fair’ share is 1.8 gha per year, which is 2.5 times the size of Wembley stadium’s football pitch.

But Hertsmere residents are using three times that at 5.54 gha, which is above the UK average and more than 7.5 times the size of the same pitch.

John Rumble, sustainability team leader for Hertfordshire County Council, explained: “Overshoot means we are in a position, globally, where the human race has used the resources the earth is capable of rejuvenating on an annual cycle.

“Effectively, it means we’re using about 1.4 planets’ worth of resources annually, so we’re using about 140 per cent of the resources available to us.”

A report commissioned by Hertfordshire Environmental Forum and published in June 2006, reveals the main contributors to Hertsmere’s ecological footprint are travel, energy use and consumption of food and drink.

Mr Rumble added: “If everybody lived the way the average UK resident lives, we’d need just over three planets, and Hertsmere is a little bit above the average. As a nation, we’re using more than our fair share and we’re doing that at the expense of other countries.”

Hertsmere residents use 0.94 gha per year on travel, which is more than 30 per cent higher than the UK figure of 0.72.

The report recommended that the borough’s residents focus on car sharing, reducing the need to travel, conserving energy used in the home, and improving waste minimisation and recycling schemes.

Since the 2006 report, the additional bin collection (ABC) scheme has been introduced to try to boost poor recycling rates in the borough. Under the system, plastic bottles, cans and waste that cannot be recycled are collected one week, with food and garden waste, cardboard and paper collected the following week.

Under the ABC scheme, recycling rates in Hertsmere have rising steadily from 11.4 per cent of all waste collected in 2005/06 to 29.6 per cent in 2007/08. So far this year, there has been an even bigger jump, with the recycling of 41.2 per cent of waste collected between April and September 2008.

Councillor Jean Heywood, Hertsmere’s environment portfolio holder, said: “It’s absolutely fantastic. We are doing very well in comparison to some other local authorities.”

She added that residents could continue to minimise their impact on the environment through small actions like turning lights off or not using the car for short journeys. She said: “They really are doing well and they should be proud.”