Discover key platforms and apps that can give you insight into your individual carbon emissions
Author: Maria-Antoanela Ioniță – Sustainability Communications Specialist
To start addressing our environmental footprint as a society, we need to include the individual level. By understanding the toll of our day-to-day lifestyle on the planet, we can begin to grasp the importance of our decisions when presented with several options for home ownership, transportation, travelling, or grocery shopping. A big component of our environmental footprint that is under public scrutiny today is carbon emissions.
What is a carbon footprint?
A carbon footprint is a measure of the total carbon dioxide emissions generated by an individual, organization, or product throughout its lifecycle. By calculating our individual carbon footprint, we can gain valuable insights into our impact on the environment and can begin to take meaningful steps towards improving.
Luckily, consumers have a wide range of tools at their disposal to calculate their carbon footprints as part of their sustainability journey.
How can you calculate your carbon footprint?
To assist individuals with reliable data about carbon footprints, more and more organizations, from NGOs to startups, are launching carbon footprint online calculators and mobile apps. Below we will be guiding you through a selection of such calculators that have gained popularity due to their accessibility and user-friendly interfaces.
All these tools enable individuals to estimate their carbon emissions based on various factors such as energy usage, transportation, food consumption, and lifestyle choices. Some of them leverage smartphone capabilities for data monitoring to provide real-time data and personalized recommendations.
What it measures: emissions from housing, transportation, groceries, electronics, furniture, banking and finance, recreational activities, and education
Carbon Footprint offers a free, comprehensive calculator for individuals that covers a wide range of emission sources. It is also one of the few calculators with personalized results depending on your location. To get insights into your household’s footprint, be prepared to offer detailed information, such as the amount of electricity and natural gas you consume in a given period. For transportation, you’ll need to specify the destinations of your flights, the mileage and efficiency of your car, or the distance you commuted for with a public transportation method. The app also takes into account your spending in different categories to calculate your secondary carbon footprint.
What it measures: emissions from transportation, food, home, other purchases, and services
Giki offers a user-friendly tool based on a questionnaire that helps you estimate your individual carbon footprint. It delves into areas such as the size and type of your housing, what transportation methods you use, what type of diet you have, and what other purchases you make on a yearly basis. As a next step after calculating your footprint, Giki suggests looking for your company’s sustainability plan on their website (they also have a service for companies), joining a beach clean, or making a carbon-cutting suggestion and sharing it with your team.
What it measures: emissions from housing, energy efficiency measures, household items, transportation, travelling, grocery shopping, clothing purchases, and pet care spending
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF)’s calculator is, in fact, a questionnaire, inquiring about your food, travel, home, and other shopping habits in order to estimate your ecological footprint. The catch is this one is tailored to the UK, but it can still offer a decent estimate for similar countries. The result is an annual total footprint, a comparison with the average for the year in the UK and worldwide, and a breakdown by key categories.
What it measures: emissions from travelling, home, food, and shopping
CoolClimate Network provides a quick carbon footprint estimate for those residing in the US. It takes into account some basic information such as the city, the number of people in your household, and the gross annual household income to generate estimates of your footprint. You can further refine these estimates by adding information about using personal cars, air travel, and public transit; your electricity, natural gas, and oil consumption; your diet, and your shopping habits. As an output, it breaks your total estimated footprint by categories and compares it to an average.
What it measures: savings in carbon emissions, water use, and waste by changing daily habits around the house, energy use, shopping, and transportation
JouleBug is a gamified app that helps companies educate and encourage their employees to adopt eco-friendly behaviours. By completing challenges and tracking their progress, individuals can understand the environmental impact of their choices, including carbon emissions. In turn, companies can track individual, team, and company environmental impacts for CO2, as well as water and waste. Examples of such actions include airing out the house to give A/C’s a rest, drying clothes on a rack instead of a dryer, taking a shorter shower, or composting your food waste.
Calculating your carbon footprint is one of the first steps you can take towards a more sustainable lifestyle. By utilising online calculators and mobile apps, individuals can gain valuable insights into their emissions and identify areas for improvement.
Photo Source: Canva
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