Using easily available carbon calculators from the internet, I've calculated varying baselines of 6.5tCO2e, 15.2tCO2e and 14.6tCO2e (and another 0.7tCO2e to add to each of them for the impact of our clothing) for our carbon footprint starting point. What!!
To be fair, the first one estimates me as an individual and the second two estimate the household (one adult and two kids). I'm choosing Carbon Positive as the tool I'll use to regularly go back and recalculate my ongoing progress. For me, it had the better breakdown across a range of categories like transport, food and waste production. Though none of these calculators considers specifically the impact of clothing or fashion, so for this I've found a separate calculator - Fashion footprint with some info below.
Climate Hero The real benefit of this tracker is how easy it is to fill in survey. It lists questions on how old your house is, how many bedrooms, how many people live there, whether you have aircon etc, etc. The rest then is more a perception of your habits, like do you try and buy local or whether you are a superstar, average or terrible on recycling habits.
It's a pretty general list, hence the decently low baseline I got from my calculation as most of my habits were along the lines of 'I try to avoid it, if I can' on use of single-use plastics, waste production and the like. Lack of detail means its unlikely to be super accurate, giving me a baseline 6.5 tonnes of CO2e for the year.
After the survey it takes you through a list of commitments you could make to reduce your carbon impact and does give estimated impacts of those - like try and source local to save 10% impact from your eating habits. Finally, you get to the 'pay to offset' prompt - for $12/month Climate Hero will offset your annual carbon emissions. You have to navigate around the website to find the list of projects, but they're quite open on the 20% of your bill goes to maintaining and developing Climate Hero the organization and 80% to the offset projects.
Climate Hero estimate: 6.5 tCO2e
After my easy entry with Climate Hero, I tried to source some Australian sites to see if that helped with the specificity of my carbon emission baseline....
CarbonNeutral Here, you really need to go hunting for all your info from the past year (such as electricity, gas and water bills, guesstimate your food intake for the year!) but as a result of all that prescriptiveness, you are getting some reasonable baseline estimates in many areas. Doesn't give a fashion (clothing) baseline but focuses on consumption in most other areas.
I also like how this site leaves the individual estimates of tCO2e on the right-hand side as you scroll through the list, making it super easy to work out where your big-ticket items of carbon emissions are as you go. At the end of this process, it's on to the prompt to offset. However, unlike the $12/month offset of Climate Hero, you get a list of projects you can offset against. For those who need to know where their dollar is going, this is a real bonus. Choose from biodiverse reforestation in Australia to conserving 5,000 ha of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil from illegal logging to a large-scale wind power project in Turkey. The cost to offset each carbon tonne is different per project, ranging around $20 to $35/ tonne offset.
Carbon Neutral is geared towards businesses (and helping them identify a reduction pathway) but has plenty of interesting info for individuals and SME's too.
Carbon Neutral estimate: 15.2 tCO2e
Carbon Positive Australia Like Carbon Neutral above, you will need all your regular details, but you can also choose different measurements periods - like weekly, three monthly or annually - meaning you can get away with more recent info. It also doesn't count fashion (come on, we have to count the fashion impact!!) and instead gives you a number for your whole household.
At the end of the calculation, you get a breakdown by category and a pie chart to easily see the biggest category of emissions; ours was food and then transport. This was a pretty nice feature and really added to the visualization of your data.
There are some high-level prompts of where to change behaviours or to reduce impacts and then the cost to offset. This calculator straight up tells you the total cost to offset (ours was $408) it then took another click to find out they use $20/tonne as the measure. While I had to navigate through the main menu to find their offset projects, this page was great, all Australian projects with a summary of each, photos and a handy map to see the project areas.
Carbon Positive estimate: 14.6 tCO2e
Fashion footprint calculator (by ThreadUp) What we wear accounts for around 4-5% of GLOBAL carbon emissions (depending on the source of your data), so it's certainly worth considering. The biggest impact in the fashion industry supply chain is actually the choice of fibre, with high use of cheap synthetics being the worst offenders. Whilst you might think - hey, let's just swap to cotton then - this can also be problematic. Growing cotton uses heaps of water and often requires high use of pesticides and fertilisers - which brings you back to environmental impact again.
The calculator is easy to use and focuses on how much you buy, dryclean, repair or reuse in a given year. For many of us, these are the sorts of answers you can calculate in your head or based on recent memory, without trawling the back receipts, so usability gets a big tick.
When it comes to fashion (stay tuned as clothing is our February target area), reuse, reclaim (like turning old jeans into a denim jacket) or recycling is a better choice.
Fashion footprint estimate: 0.7 tCO2e
The baseline
I'll be using the Carbon Positive baseline of 15.2tCO2e (to which I added in my fashion footprint) of 0.7tCO2e, giving us a total starting point of 15.9tCO2e and a target to shave at least 2.5tCO2e of that in year one.
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