December 21st 2006, Our House, Derby
To work out your Carbon Footprint, i.e. how much CO2 you create each year, you need to know a few things.
For Gas and Electricity you need to know how many Kilowatt hours (kwh) you used over a year. This info is on your gas and electricity bills.
For cars you need to know how many miles you drive in a year, what miles per gallon you got or (and its probably easier to use this) find out what the CO2 Emissions are for your car. You can find this at the VCA Car Fuel Data website.
Gas & Electricity
Getting the old bills out we worked out we used 12000kwh of gas and 6000kwh of electricity last year.
Using the calculator on the
Carbon Footprint website that
showed that we generated 2280kgs of CO2 by using gas and 2580kgs CO2
for the electricity.
So despite using twice as much gas as electricity, electricity creates more CO2. In fact for every 1kwh of gas used 0.19kgs of CO2 is created and for each 1kwh of electricity its 0.41kgs.
Total CO2 created from our gas and electricity consumption is 4860kgs per year.
Cars
To work out the CO2 produced by our cars the Target Neutral website has handy a calculator.
Kev's Audi A4 diesel does an average
of 20k miles a year at about 49mpg. This meant this car alone produced a massive
4969kgs of CO2 each year.
Tracie's Mini Cooper S does an average of 8.5k miles per year. We had to used the CO2 Emissions (g/km) figure from the VCA Car Fuel Data website.
We know the mpg isn't good and its scares us to think about it
too much. When worked out the CO2 came to 2942kgs per year.
Total CO2 created by our cars is a whopping 7911kgs per year.
The scores on the doors
With a total annual Household CO2 production of 12771kgs we wanted to know how we compared to the National Average which very conveniently the Carbon Footprint website tells you. The graph below shows how we compare.
It all looks pretty good until you look at the cars column!
What else we plan to do?
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Look at ways to off set the CO2 produced by our cars.
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Look at ways to reduce our gas consumption.
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Look at ways to reduce our electricity consumption.
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Look at ways to reduce our water consumption.
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Work out what our Carbon Footprint is after we have done the above.
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Find out how to recycle more and monitor just how much we do.