Carbon Footprint

My employer is developing a carbon footprinting tool for business and as a result I spent all day Monday in a meeting trying to work out how best we could deliver this. This got me thinking that it was about time I worked out my footprint. There are various websites that make it easy to work out your individual carbon footprint - I opted for the BP calculator which is a little over simplistic but is a good starting point. It reckons my footprint is 8 tonnes of CO2 per year - sounds a lot but this is 'lower than UK average'.

The questions it asks did remind me of some of the areas of my lifestyle that could do with improvement to reduce CO2 emissions - car travel is the major one but it's difficult to reduce that when I live 8 miles from the office. I can take some comfort in the fact that whilst our car isn't the most fuel efficient, it is 7 years old and we have no plans to change it yet, so we're making best use of it's embedded energy (the energy used to manufacture it, which in many cases far exceeds the energy used by something during it's existence).

There's probably a better carbon footprinting tool than the BP one (if you find it let me know), which didn't take into account shopping habits (local, box schemes, home grown veg etc) and other CO2 reducing measures. Hopefully BP and others will improve the quality of such resources over time, as we all become more aware of the impact of CO2 emissions.

If you want to do something now to reduce your CO2 emissions how about installing CO2 Saver http://co2saver.snap.com/index.php to reduce the power consumption of your PC?