Living with a zero carbon footprint is a way of life.
There is a growing awareness that environmental issues are important to us and looking after our planet should be our top priority.
Just like recycling has become part of our daily lives, in the same way minimising our carbon footprint (and offsetting it) will be mainstream in future.
We invite you to join our zero footprint community. You will be part of a growing number of people who don’t want to leave a carbon footprint and contribute to global warming. Becoming a zero footprint individual is a positive step towards sustainable modern living.
In our carbon footprint calculator you can calculate the carbon emissions for your life so far. Offsetting these makes you a zero footprint individual. When you do this we will send you confirmation that you are a zero footprint individual.
You can also give a gift membership to friends and family and eliminate their carbon footprint completely.
Because we leave a carbon footprint every day of our lives, we must offset our emissions regularly to remain zero footprint.
A good idea is to offset for all past emissions once and then offset once a year for all annual emissions (which you can estimate in the calculator). Once you know your average annual emissions, you can use the “quick” field of the calculator to offset a given number of tonnes.
Offsetting is not the miracle cure for past sins. We must view it as a process to participate in a low-carbon lifestyle, by eliminating the impact of our carbon emissions. We have included some practical advice on our section zero footprint. The UK government has also published useful practical advice on the Act on CO2 website.
The ideal approach is to minimise our carbon footprint and offset the remainder.
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offset my life
Offset your carbon footprint from birth to the present. You can do this in the calculator’s section “my life”.
The life carbon footprint is the cumulative footprint of all past emissions. It depends on age and lifestyle choices.
Age
Every day adds to your life’s carbon footprint, so it is constantly increasing in time.
Your annual footprint varies each year. It grows steadily and peaks at some point in adult life. This means that your life’s carbon footprint grows at its fastest rate during adulthood.
Age is a useful parameter to estimate your life’s carbon footprint.
Lifestyle choices
The carbon footprint is correlated to GDP and varies a lot from country to country.
If we don’t have accurate information about a person’s lifestyle, the country average will be a reasonable estimate of their carbon footprint. Our lifestyle choices can make us depart significantly from the average.
In the calculator’s section “my life” we use these parameters. A calculation based on age and lifestyle choices provides the most accurate measure of your life’s carbon footprint.
You can even go one step further. Our calculator computes your past emissions, but you can make a guess of your likely life span and enter that age instead of your present age. This will estimate the carbon footprint for your entire life, including past and future emissions (assuming there are no significant lifestyle changes).
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super-offsetting
This is to offset for more CO2 than you actually emit.
You can do this in the “quick” section of our calculator, by entering an arbitrary amount to offset.
There are three reasons why this is relevant.
One reason is because we are likely to underestimate our true emissions. Super-offsetting corrects this and can be a more accurate offset of our true carbon footprint.
For example, when we offset one flight it is likely that there are many add-ons that are not factored in, such as meals and purchases at the airport. Besides, for each flight that we offset there are probably many flights in the past that we haven’t offset. Super-offsetting (by a reasonable amount, based on an informed guess) is likely to get us closer to the real picture.
The second reason is to increase impact. In order to combat global warming more efficiently carbon offsetting must maximise its impact and reach.
In the UK the average annual carbon footprint is 11 tonnes of CO2. This means that a person who offsets 11 tonnes for himself, plus a super-offset of 11 tonnes is doubling his impact.
The third reason for super-offsetting is the most important.
Super-offsetting is the only way to reverse climate change. By offsetting our emissions we are eliminating our adverse contribution to climate change (our carbon footprint) but we are not reversing the trend.
CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere remain high and global warming continues. We must therefore super-offset and capture more carbon from the atmosphere than is emitted. This will result in a gradual decrease of CO2 concentrations.
Super-offsetting to reverse global warming must be ultimately on a grand scale in order to be effective.
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offset your friends
Offset a friend or relative’s carbon footprint through the “gift” page of our carbon footprint calculator.
At the bottom of the page there is the option “other occasions”. You can offset a friend’s life carbon footprint or simply a number of years of their life.
It is similar to offsetting your life’s carbon footprint in the section “my life”.
As we discuss in “offset my life”, the life carbon footprint is the cumulative emissions from birth to the present and it depends on age and lifestyle choices. The “gift” page will give an estimate based on age, for simplicity.
We believe that a gift of several years’ offset or even better, offsetting your friend’s life carbon footprint (and therefore they will join the zero footprint community), is an excellent way to raise awareness as well as combating climate change.
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zero footprint living
Our goal is to achieve a zero carbon footprint for everyone on our planet.
It is a dream, but not an unfeasible one.
Everything we do in modern life has a carbon footprint, and this carries a very high cost to our environment. It is responsible for global warming, and if it isn’t drastically cut our planet’s heating process will escalate until it becomes irreversible. Our enormous carbon footprint has become the characteristic of our modern times and it is not a model of sustainability.
It hasn’t always been like this. Human activity has gone on for centuries with negligible carbon emissions, and it is only in the last century that our carbon footprint as a species has escalated to astronomical levels.
But, is it truly inevitable?
Much of our carbon footprint is avoidable. Cutting down unnecessary consumption is one way to do this; using greener choices such as public transport, low-energy bulbs and minimising the consumption of transport-intensive goods will also contribute to reduce your carbon footprint.
It is even possible for an individual or a business to achieve a zero carbon footprint. We do not need to give up modern life to achieve this. We can rely on improved technologies to help us produce greener electricity and a low-carbon economy. By recycling and through sensible choices in our consumption we can minimise our footprint. What remains of it can only be completely cancelled out through carbon offsets.
The average person in the UK emits about 11 tonnes of CO2 in a year. It takes roughly about 11 fast-growing trees at a tropical latitude over a tree’s lifetime of about 40-50 years to offset that amount of carbon. Given that the UK population is 60.9 million (as of 2008), one would need to plant about 670 million such trees every year to make the United Kingdom a completely zero footprint country. Tree planting on such a vast scale would bring fantastic benefits to the global environment, in addition to completely eliminating our carbon footprint.
That would be the ideal to aim for, although it is extremely ambitious. It certainly is not impossible. It is very feasible to carry out tree planting and reforestation on a very large scale. There is no shortage of tropical land where this can be done. At a market value of £7 per tonne offset, the financial cost of making the UK zero carbon footprint per annum would be £4.7bn (as of 2008).
We can all contribute towards that goal by eliminating our own individual carbon footprint. A zero footprint individual doesn’t do without the comforts of modern life, but has a net zero carbon footprint by offsetting their estimated carbon footprint.
We have tried to show how this can be calculated in our carbon footprint calculator. The section my life shows how to offset all carbon emissions in your life, and to compute how much you need to offset on an ongoing basis in order to continue cancelling your carbon footprint.
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