#Calculate carbon footprint free#

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#Calculate carbon footprint free#

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Quickly calculate your own carbon footprint Browse the carbon footprints of activities and products The ultimate climate change FAQ Similarly, one website might estimate a person's footprint based only on their home energy and travel, while another might include an estimate of all the goods and services they consume, from clothes and computers to education and healthcare. For example, one website might focus only on the fuel use involved in flying while another might include an estimate of the climate impact of the vapour trails caused by the plane. However, the answers can vary widely between websites depending on the methodology used. There are many 'carbon calculators' on the web to help people work out the carbon footprint of their life or individual activities such as flights. Those figures can then be used to estimate the footprint of, say, each pound spent on toys. toy manufacturing, food growing, freight, etc) and estimating the total emissions that each sector accounts for. This aims to avoid missing out pathways by taking the total emissions of a country or region, dividing it lots of sectors (e.g. An alternative approach is to use so-called 'input-output' analysis. The traditional way of estimating a carbon footprint – so-called 'lifecycle assessment' – involves adding up as many of the emissions pathways as is feasible. Within the footprint of that steel is a small allocation to take account of the maintenance of a digger in the iron mine that the steel originally came from … and so on for ever. The staff in the offices of the plastic factory used paper clips made of steel. To make the point clearly, let's try following just one of those pathways. If you think about it, tracing back all the things that have to happen to make that toy leads to an infinite number of pathways. These are just a few of the processes involved. The true carbon footprint of a plastic toy includes not only the direct emissions resulting from the manufacturing process and the transportation of the toy to the shop: it also includes a whole host of indirect emissions, such as those caused by the extraction and processing of the oil used to make the plastic in the first place. As Mike Berners-Lee explains in his book, How Bad Are Bananas?, The Carbon Footprint of Everything:

For more complicated activities these uncertainties are greatly multiplied. Even for simple activities such as burning a litre of petrol, which releases a known amount of CO2, there are still uncertainties about the emissions caused by extracting and refining the petrol before it was burned. There are many existing and evolving standards for calculating carbon footprints but in truth no footprint is precise.