Apps and sites that measure your carbon footprint

Transport, consumption, energy… There are now many applications or websites that offer to draw up a precise assessment of your carbon footprint.

It is a concern linked to awareness: how to limit your carbon footprint? It is difficult to realize your personal balance sheet and the actions to be taken on a daily basis. Hence the interest in relying on applications and sites dedicated to a more eco-responsible life. This is the case, for example, Earth Hero. To find it, search for “climate action”, it will be easier. Its slogan: “through action comes hope!“. Unfortunately, you can’t do anything without creating an account. The application then launches a questionnaire to estimate your consumption: including the number of kilometers traveled by car last year, the number of plane trips, the renewable or non-renewable origin of the energy you use, the number of days per week with meat or seafood at meals. The application then offers 150 ideas for actions to take to reduce your carbon footprint.

On a fairly similar principle, very precise on the carbon footprint of your means of transport, there is the simulator of goodplanet.org, which is in French despite its name. Unlike footprintcalculator.org, in English, which plays the shock effect by displaying the date beyond which you will have consumed all your carbon quota for the year. There is also the application – in French – Open Food Facts, which displays the carbon footprint of a food product by scanning its barcode with the camera.

And then there is this official site, impactCO2.fr, offered by the Environment and Energy Management Agency (ADEME). This one includes three tabs. The first opens a comparator, a tool to keep in mind the orders of magnitude. We choose our reference, for example, a distance traveled by plane, 5836 km like the distance Paris-New York. Result, the 887 kg of CO2 corresponding to more than 200 round trips Paris-Marseille by TGV, to nearly 450 meals with white fish and to the manufacture of almost two flat screens.

The second tab offers the calculation of the carbon impact of means of transport, from bicycles to planes. And the third tab concerns seasonal fruits and vegetables. We learn, for example, that the production of tomatoes in summer generates four times less CO2 than those we continue to consume in winter. Garlic, eggplant, cucumber, zucchini are in the green with less than 500g of CO2 equivalent compared to almost 4 kg for an artichoke and more than 10 kg for a mango which – most often – has taken the plane. In 2021, each French person consumed, on average, 9.9 tonnes of CO2 equivalent according to Carbone 4, which is five times more than the ideal objective.