New CO2 calculator for a more sustainable lifestyle

We consume a lot of CO2 in our daily activities – whether it is on the way to work, buying food and consumer products or within our own four walls. You can find a variety of online calculators that allow you to roughly estimate your footprint. Our new CO2 calculator allows you to individually calculate your greenhouse gas emissions based on actual data. We also provide tips on how to improve your carbon footprint in the future.

How your carbon footprint is calculated

Your carbon footprint is a measure of your personal impact on climate change. If you have a small footprint, it means that you produce very little CO2 through your lifestyle. A large footprint shows that you live a rather resource-intensive life. To determine your own footprint is therefore the first important step to ensure that the earth remains habitable for everyone in the future.

As with other CO2 calculators, we start with a short survey for a rough estimate of your annual CO2 emissions. All you have to do is provide us with some information about your electricity consumption, heating requirements, consumption and eating habits, and the means of transportation you use. These averages are used as reference and are stored in your profile, where you can correct them at any time if necessary.

The unique feature of the BitsaboutMe CO2 calculator is that it uses real data from different areas of life to individually calculate your carbon footprint. To do this, we analyze your actual consumption. We start with mobility data from your Google account, i.e. information on how you move from A to B. In the coming weeks and months, we will expand this approach with actual data from shopping, streaming and finance. So the more online accounts you connect, the more meaningful the results will be!

At this point we would like to point out that your data for the calculation of the carbon footprint will always remain private and will never be shared with third parties.

Get tips for a better carbon footprint

Two tons of CO2 per person per year is the upper limit to prevent the greenhouse effect from increasing further and to protect the climate – also for future generations. However, the actual emission per person is currently many times higher in industrialized countries: for example, an EU citizen produces an average of about 7 tons of CO2 per year.

BitsaboutMe now allows you to determine your individual carbon footprint

To visualize your personal carbon footprint you will find a new card in the Insights section.

On the first graphic you can see how much CO2 you produce through your current lifestyle and how this is distributed across the sub-areas of housing, mobility, digital, consumption and eating behavior. In addition, we show you how many earths it would take if everyone would live like you and in which area you have the most potential to reduce your emissions.

The development of your CO2 consumption over time is illustrated on the second graph. On the one hand, you can easily find out in which months you have produced particularly high emissions, e.g. by air travel. On the other hand, you can follow the cumulative increase over the last 12 months and see how you compare to the EU average and to the “ideal” footprint (2 tons of CO2 per year).

Do you know your personal carbon footprint? Use the CO2 calculator on BitsaboutMe to determine your annual emissions and find out where your greatest potential for improvement lies!

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