CO2 Emissions
In the journey to going green, there are so many things to consider! There are so many things thrown at you that it can be overwhelming - sometimes so much so that it can have the opposite effect. It can cause you to feel a little panicked and wonder what difference you can make?
Through my journey to make my home-life - and our Massage Me business life - more sustainable, I’ve found some great tools that can help you to make individual changes that together will add up to real change. But first…
What is a tonne of CO2?
How can we even visualise what that is - CO2 is an invisible gas! This in itself makes it hard to comprehend what we are talking about. I loved this visual as it really helped me clarify what we are all talking about.
Another way to think of it is that a tonne of CO2 is the average emissions of 1 passenger on a return flight from Paris to New York.
Now we know what a tonne of CO2 would look like; how do you know how much CO2 you, your family or your business produce?
Carbon Footprint Calculator
At the bottom of this article is a carbon footprint calculator. It's a simple tool I have found really useful to figure out how much CO2 I was producing and in which areas of my life. This meant I could then break down where I was focusing and which areas I can make the quickest or the most change. This tool then also links to ideas on how you can look to offset your carbon emissions.
To give some ideas of guidelines, the average carbon footprint in the UK is 12.7 tonnes (PawPrint), which is down from 15 tonnes ten years ago. According to Mike Berners-Lee, the author of “How Bad are Bananas?” we should aim to work towards a 5-tonne lifestyle.
You want to reduce, but how?
On the POW UK site, they break down the different areas of your life that you can affect. We also love their analogy because it is broken down into green runs, blue, red and black. A visual image we can get on board with!
Credit : Protect Our Winters UK
There are many suggestions on how you can get started on reducing your carbon emissions, especially with educating yourself and those around you. One of the best tools I have found so far - and one of the quickest and biggest ways to impact-is to check your energy provider.
Try to start educating yourself and those around you. The book I mentioned above is a great place to learn about how much CO2 is produced by items that we consume daily - from sending a text, writing an email to taking a holiday flight. Mike Berners-Lee’s idea is to give us the tools to know how much CO2 is produced by the production and consumption of an item just by looking at it - in the same way that we can walk around a shop and know (roughly) how much something will cost based on our internal knowledge. If we have this knowledge, we can start making small but informed choices daily.
Energy Providers
I recently found this great tool from Greenpeace France, which quickly ranks the energy providers in your area and lets you know their key policies concerning the environment. I was quite surprised to find that my current energy provider was not as green as I’d been led to believe.
Fortunately, it was quite a quick job to get some new quotes from the top listed eco providers and make the change. It even seems like the prices will be lower than what I was paying previously. All you need to do is fill in one form, and they take care of the rest.
For those of you in the UK, look at POW UK and the Winter Alliance, which have set up The Big Clean Switch which helps you find greener energy options in the UK.
So there you go, some basic tools to get you started on your journey of reducing your carbon emissions and moving towards a net-zero emissions future.
Let us know how you get on with your journey!