Measure Your Carbon Footprint

You don’t have to measure your carbon footprint in order to start reducing it but go on, admit it – you’re curious, aren’t you? You want to know just how much (or hopefully how little) an impact you’re having on the planet.

It’s a case where smaller really is more beautiful.

So how do you go about calculating your carbon footprint, when virtually everything you do creates carbon? You need to go through every little thing, and be thorough and honest, until you reach a final total. That includes what you spend on heating and running the appliances in your home, your car, every facet.

Your Home

For many of us, it’s gas that brings water and heat into the home. Look at the kilowatt hours (kwh) on each of the four quarterly bills for the last year, and add them up. To find out your total emissions, multiply the number of kilowatt hours by 0.19, then divide by the amount of adults in the house to discover the figure. If you’re not bothered about being completely exact, calculate 10,000 kwh for a small house, 20,500 for a medium-sized house, and 28,000 for a large house

For electricity you should also total the kilowatt hours used over a year, then multiply that figure by 0.43, and finally divide by the number of adults in the house. If the bills have vanished, try a rough total of 1,650 kwh for a small house, 3,300 kwh for a medium sized house, or 5,000 kwh for a large house.

Your Car

Figuring the carbon footprint for you car is a lot trickier, and any figure is going to be a guesstimate. So much depends on how far you drive, as well as how you drive, on top of the type of vehicle you own.

Take that figure, then multiply it by the kilometres you drive each year (you can determine that from the miles driven multiplied by 1.609 to reach a kilometre figure). From there, you take the number of kilometres driven in a year and multiply it by your emissions. Divide that figure by 1000 and you get the kilogram total – your car’s annual carbon footprint.

Other Items

There are, of course, many other things in your life – your shopping, for instance, and it’s almost impossible to come up with a carbon total for that over the course of a year. Much of our food comes from abroad, meaning it has “food miles” attached to it – but did you buy strawberries 10 months ago? How would you remember?

Still, there are a few things you can calculate. Take your holiday, for instance. Where did you go? Did you fly there? If so, you can come up with a figure for the CO2 emissions on the flight. Maybe you went to Turkey, a very popular destination. If you did, that’s 1275 kg of carbon – per person each way. If you take two foreign holidays a year and fly, the figures soon add up. It can be very instructive to sit down and calculate your carbon footprint, and the chances are that you’ll be surprised at just how large it is. That knowledge can be an important first step in lowering it.

If maths isn’t your strongest point, don’t worry. There are a number of web sites where you can simply enter the figures and they’ll make the calculations for you. However you do it, it’s the results, and the determination to change things, that matter.