The case for carbon accounting
A recent report found that just 36 companies account for half the global carbon emissions. It’s not the first such headline we’ve heard over the years. China and the US together equally account for half of global emissions, the built environment for just under 40 percent. Volkswagen alone once claimed that it estimates it’s company’s total footprint to be 2% of global emissions - a total of roughly 800 Million tons per year, more than Germany itself.
Hearing such statistics, it is easy to feel a mix of despair and indifference when looking at the impact of personal lifestyle choices on global carbon emissions. After all, with the average EU citizen’s emissions hovering around 10 tons a year, that’s a mere 0.001% of Volkswagen’s annual emissions, it would barely classify as a rounding error.
And yet, such comparisons miss a crucial point - Volkswagens emissions ARE individual emissions. The 2 percent figure is not caused by inefficient factories, much less so by the overhead required to run the business. Over 90% of the figure comes from the tens of millions individuals and businesses using their cars every single day - filling up their gas tanks at one of the 36 companies mentioned earlier. In other words, most, if not all, of the world’s most polluting businesses serve a direct consumer need across a large consumer base.
The case gets even more pronounced when discussing sectors like fashion or agriculture where virtually 100% of the output goes directly to consumers, often to be discarded shortly after. In fact, globally roughly 72% percent of emissions can be directly linked to consumer choices as opposed to corporate investments and public spending.
So to have a meaningful discussion about carbon emissions of any sector globally - wouldn’t the end-consumer be the natural point to start?
The micro and the macro
The most readily available information on consumer emissions comes in the form of national averages - that is, dividing a country’s total emissions by its number of residents. When starting from scratch, this data is useful so far as to compare the emissions of various areas, such as transportation, food, housing, purchases, and public spending.
However, it quickly falls apart on an individual level. For example, the average emissions for French residents from car trips are 2100kg a year. Far from all French citizens own or use a car on a regular basis - meaning that the average for those who do is higher than 2100kg - and potentially close to zero for others.
The same is true for flights - the 420 kg displayed here roughly equate to a roundtrip flight from Paris to Barcelona. People who don’t regularly fly will not produce these emissions, whereas a single long-distance roundtrip can single-handedly cause several tons of CO2 emissions.
In other words - national averages while useful for political discussions, bear little relation to the reality of any specific individuals carbon footprint. Doing so to estimate ones own emissions is inaccurate and unlikely to yield any clarity about the impact of ones own lifestyle.
It’s about as useful as knowing that the average European spends 5000 Euros a year on buying a new car (90% of citizens don’t buy a new car in any given year).
So, knowing the averages - how would you go about calculating your own carbon footprint?
Running the numbers
Let’s start with a simplistic approach - do you, on average, buy more or less “stuff” than the average citizen? Let’s say you compiled your bank statements for the past year and have a full lineup of transactions you made. Could it be a simple as just assigning a carbon emission value to each transaction based on the type of good or service you purchased?
Several applications have tried this approach. For example, using the database provided by DeCarbon, for each US Dollar spent on food and beverages, the application assigns a value of 273 grams of CO2 - or 884 for farmers markets?
How is this calculated? Solutions like DeCarbon constructing an average basket of goods to a specific purchase. For example, it might assign a typical basket of vegetables, fruits, meat, bread, milk, cornflakes, etc for any grocery shopping expense. But herein lays the problem - what constitutes a typical basket? We know that beef emits about 10 times the amount of CO2 per gram as compared to chicken, which in turn emits up to 10 times the amount of a similar caloric value for vegetables.
So just knowing the value of products won’t get us very far.
Building a full purchase inventory
It now becomes clear that the issue is more complex than it seems - it’s as if you were being tasked to estimate your expenses for the past year without having access to your bank statement - worse even, without knowing the prices for pretty much anything you buy.
Instead, for each good or service you purchased, you would have to find a price (or in our case emission value) that describes the specific product rather than the category or monetary value you spent on it.
Housing
Let’s start with the basics - rent, bills, utilities, telco. If you did not know the lease price of your flat, you could find an estimate by observing certain characteristics of your flat: size, age of the building, location, and so on.
For utilities, you might have a meter for electricity and gas that you can read - and multiplied by the current electricity retail price should give you a good idea of what you are spending. For Telco, you could simply look up your contract on the internet and take it from there.
Then there’s all the other “stuff” you might have bought over the past year - furniture, appliances, home electronics, tableware, decoration etc.
Food
Next on your expense list, you might turn to groceries. You will most likely not have kept track of all the groceries you bought in the past year so to get an estimate on your grocery spending, you might keep track of the items you buy for a typical week - and look up their representative prices on the internet - how much for a tomato, a steak, a box of cornflakes and so on.
The same could be done when eating out by describing the given meal at hand. A tedious task - but doable with enough time and energy.
Transportation
Now let’s turn to transportation. A couple of considerations to make here: What methods of transportation do you use? How often do you use them? What, if any, vehicles do you own?
For some modes of transportation, the calculations are rather straightforward. Bikes require a one-time purchase and occasional maintenance that can be depreciated similarly to furniture and appliances. Similarly, metro and urban rail cards are typically a monthly subscription whose price only occasionally changes over time.
Cars and motorcycles however will need regular fuel purchases as an ongoing cost that will in turn depend on the time and distance traveled. For your own car, you might keep track of the yearly mileage driven - but if you don’t you’d have to estimate it in turn based on your commuting and travel habits.
Lastly, long distance trains and flights will be one-off purchases. If you don’t have access to their specific price points, you could use online search engines to find average prices for them over the year.
Purchases
With that, we can advance to the messiest category of all, purchases, relating to everything not covered so far. From what we can see, most purchases will fall into one of the following categories:
Clothes and Accessories including all fashion items from jeans and blazers over scarfs and gloves to watches and jewelry
Hobbies and Free-time Activities including sports, cultural events, museum visits, lectures and various other activities
Consumables including perfumes, cosmetics, cleaning products, and personal hygiene
Services including everything from dry-cleaning over hairdressers to spa appointments.
Electronics including your smartphone, laptop, headphones and the like
Many items in this category will be recurrent purchases (such as skincare cosmetics) while others may more closely resemble the “inventory” form the housing section (such as smartphones and laptops)
In either case, if you managed to get to this point, chances are you’ll be quite frustrated about where to stop counting - that is where the expenses get to small to make a reasonable impact.
Our golden rule when it comes to these considerations can be defined as “is it steak” - that is, are the total emissions from such an item likely to amount to the same or more carbon emissions over the course of a year than a single medium size beef steak (that is about 10-15kg).
In our thought experiment, we imagined that for any given purchase you would easily find a representative price online. But is this equally the case for carbon emissions?
From products to emissions
In 2021, a multi-national research team set out to create a “carbon catalogue” to let users browse the compiled emissions from publicly available PCF (product carbon footprint) reports.
Their result? A catalogue spanning 866 commercial products, many of which are not consumer goods (e.g. coal, steel, industrial parts). The remainder includes hundreds of near-duplicates, such as 25 types of Levi’s jeans or 11 types of Barilla pasta (as well as a surprising number of laser printers), such that when filtering for common everyday items, one is left with only a few dozen unique entries.
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The good news is that in recent years, due to a mix of consumer demand and regulatory requirements, tens of thousands of new PCF reports have been published and are publicly available online.
Apple, for example, has published PCF reports for virtually their entire product line dating all the way back to 2009. Dell and Lenovo followed shortly after. More recently other electronics brands like HP, Acer, Asus, and Samsung publish reports for at least part of their product line.
In the transportation sector, car brands like Mercedes have started releasing PCF reports for various models in the 2010s. Equally, bike manufacturer Giant released the first ever comprehensive PCF report for a bicycle in 2022 and has since expanded reporting to the majority of their product line.
In the fashion industry, Allbirds became the first major brand to release PCF reports for all of their permanent product line starting in 2020. Then, just last year, we saw product carbon footprint reports being embraced by a number of European brands following stricter supply chain disclosures. Notable mentions include Maje, Agnes B, Ba&sh and Claudie Pierlot.
Smaller manufacturers and service providers have followed suit, leading us to have accurate data on everything from opera visits over a pair of ski to an average gym sessions.
While there are still areas such as furniture and home appliances, where data remains to be scarce, most sectors now provide at least some reasonable emission values.
The catch? No database has ever compiled these reports and lets consumers browse through them easily, visualizing the impact of specific purchases, and letting consumers compare alternatives across manufacturers.
Is there an easier way?
Recognizing that few people want to spend weeks of their life compiling a full inventory of their purchases and painstakingly search for any available information on them, gave us an idea.
What if we could simplify this process for consumers from weeks of tedious tracking down to a few simple taps?
What if, instead of logging emissions only after the fact, consumers could pro-actively compare the impact of their purchase decisions before making a given purchase?
What if, by doing so, one could help render the public discourse around carbon emissions less emotionally charged and more factual and solution oriented?
Answering these questions is what led us to build Colibri - a first of a kind personal emission tracker that is built on data of real products and can give individuals a deep insight into the emissions of their consumption behavior, based on real purchases and purchase habits
With Colibri, users can deep dive into their emissions, compare them against their peers and track their evolution over time before browsing through real alternatives and supplementary information
Did we peek your interest? Then join our beta program now via the link below and become one of our the first ever users.