Carbon footprint calculators offer an easy way to estimate how damaging your everyday activities are on the environment.
All of us have a personal and professional responsibility to reduce our carbon emissions. As part of our sustainability series, we want to bring you all the top tools and tricks to make it as easy as possible for you to understand, and therefore, reduce your carbon emissions. There’s no better place to start than by entering your usage details into a carbon footprint calculator.
While even results on the lower end of the scale are never an easy pill to swallow, ultimately if you don’t know you need to do better, how can you ever make it a reality?
So here are 5 carbon footprint calculators you can try out today to see where you’re currently at.
Note: The answers given for each calculator we tried are randomised and are not a direct representation of our personal usage.
WWF Carbon Footprint Calculator
Kicking things off, the WWF carbon footprint calculator focuses on food, travel, home and ‘stuff’.
What we like is that a lot of the thinking here has been done for you, with the calculator mostly consisting of straightforward answers to select. All in all the entire survey only takes a couple of minutes to complete, and at the end, you’ll be presented with your estimated carbon footprint. The results will also show your score compared with others in your country as well as the world as a whole.
Underneath, you’ll also get a breakdown of what your score means in real terms, including why you may have scored high or low in certain categories. From there you have a much better chance of understanding your carbon footprint and how to reduce it.
The Nature Conservancy
Offering a carbon footprint just for American households is The Nature Conservancy.
Featured in its carbon footprint calculator is an overview of you as an individual, your travel habits, home life, food consumption and shopping trends.
This calculator gets a little more in-depth, especially during the food section when it asks you to break down how you get your calories from specific food groups. While this may give more detailed answers if you know the answer – the question really is will you know how to answer such categories accurately?
Though, what we do like at the end is the ‘take action’ section giving a rundown of how each aspect can be improved upon.
The UX is certainly more basic with The Nature Conservancy, but this actually means the website emits less carbon than graphics-heavy websites.
United Nations Carbon Footprint Calculator
As you might expect, the United Nations puts in a solid effort where its carbon footprint calculator is concerned.
It breaks its requirements down into household, transport and lifestyle emissions. Although it doesn’t allow you to go into minute detail, it does offer carbon offsetting solutions at the end of the quiz whereas other calculators don’t.
Another advantage of the United Nations calculator is that it doesn’t ask for as much personal information such as your salary or postcode (zip code) as is the case with some of the other calculators on our list.
UK Government – My 2050 Carbon Calculator
‘Create your pathway to a low carbon UK by 2050’ is the UK Government headline for their carbon footprint calculator.
With a more visually interactive feel, this calculator actually works a little differently. That’s because you have to select an ambition level of one to four, with the higher the number denoting what your organisation is aiming to achieve to reduce its emissions.
At the end, you’ll then be presented with a graph which details your current CO2 emissions compared with how your company will be looking in 2050. Crucially, you can find out whether your intended actions will leave you on track or way off your climate goals in time for the 2050 deadline.
Carbon Independent
Carbon Independent is a good option for those who aren’t exactly sure of their carbon footprint but can give a general average. That’s because this calculator will determine what your footprint likely is based on generic answers rather than asking for super specific figures.
Although you should still hunt out more accurate answers, by the same token you can use this calculator to flag up any huge issues. For instance, the questions about food miles, food packaging and composting help you think more about your everyday activities.
What is unique about Carbon Independent is that it’s the only carbon calculator we’ve found so far that allows you to select ‘halls of residence’ as a housing option, thus being more accessible to students as well as individuals and businesses.
Carbon Footprint FAQs
Still trying to wrap your head around all things carbon footprint? Whether you’re an individual or a business, we know that understanding exactly what a carbon footprint is, let alone reducing yours is no easy feat. But with knowledge, you can have power.
So here are the top questions people ask in relation to carbon footprints to give you a general overview.
If you’d like to find out how you can reduce the carbon footprint of your business, scroll down to see our new product, EcoSend by GoSquared.
What Is A Carbon Footprint?
A carbon footprint is a calculation of the total amount of greenhouse gases generated by each of our actions. By actions, this relates to the likes of food, transport, travel, leisure and even our shopping habits – basically anything that generates carbon to facilitate our daily lives.
Globally, the average person has a carbon footprint of 4 tonnes. Though in the United States, the individual carbon footprint per citizen is around 16 tonnes. To avoid the feared 2°C rise in global temperatures, every person on earth would need a carbon footprint below 2 tonnes.
What Is A Carbon Footprint Apex?
Apex hasn’t reinvented carbon footprint terminology wheel as carbon footprint on the Apex website still relates to the amount of carbon being generated by our actions. However, Apex is a financial service provider whose work spans environmental causes, governments and general society. So carbon footprint Apex simply refers to the work this company does in those sectors.
How To Reduce Carbon Footprint
There are endless ways we can all reduce our carbon footprint. The first step is really to determine what your carbon footprint is by using one of the above carbon footprint calculators. From there, you can see where your emissions are coming from and see what you can do to reduce these. For instance, switching to green energy in your home, recycling more, flying less or even eating locally grown produce rather than food with lots of air miles.
How To Offset Carbon Footprint
To offset your carbon footprint, you have to know what your carbon footprint is so you can find a method of pulling the same amount of carbon out of the atmosphere. One of our favourite ways of offsetting carbon is by planting trees. That said, it’s important to remember that offsetting alone isn’t enough to solve our climate crisis, as we all have to look at creating fewer carbon emissions in the first place.
Why Is Carbon Footprint Important?
Knowing our carbon footprint is important so we can understand our individual impact on our climate. Only then can we take steps – big and small – to bring our footprint down to lessen the impact our everyday actions are having on our planet.
EcoSend By GoSquared – Reduce The Carbon Footprint Of Your Email Marketing Campaigns
Want to know something you can do right now to reduce the carbon footprint of your business?
EcoSend by GoSquared is our new product. It’s a climate-conscious email marketing tool that gives you everything you need to intuitively market your business but without the impact on the environment.
After all, most people don’t realise that for every email sent, it generates anywhere from 4g to 50g of carbon per email (research by the BBC) depending on the weight of that email. With over 300 billion emails sent per day, that soon adds up.
With EcoSend, we’re carbon negative meaning we offset more carbon than we produce. With an aim to run solely on renewable energy, we’ll also plant trees on your behalf – we’ll even plant a tree just for signing up for our waitlist.
Join us at EcoSend today and we’ll help you do your bit for your company’s climate objectives.
