The UK uses map to show carbon footprints
By Hilary Powell
I’m green with environmental envy about a site launched by Google overseas.
While researching how a successful 2016 Olympic bid in Chicago may impact carbon emissions in the city, I felt pangs of jealousy about how advanced one country is in tracking, well, their dirty tracks.
Last October, Google rolled out an interactive map that serves as a carbon footprint calculator and allows users to view the carbon footprints of others. Dubbed the UK Carbon Footprint Project, the site also allows users to make a personalized home page, iGoogle, with a carbon footprint newsfeed.
Carbon calculators can help determine an individual or household’s carbon footprint, or the “quantity of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere as a result of household energy use, transportation and waste disposal in one year,” according to BP’s Web site.
Team LoJo was specifically interested in how these calculators could be combined with interactive maps to track carbon counts from one destination to another.
One interesting aspect of the UK Carbon Footprint Project is that it allows residents to share information about their emissions and to compare their carbon footprint to the national average.
According to the Project:
On a personalised page, you can track your progress, update your carbon-reducing actions and see a Google Map featuring the footprints and actions of everyone taking part.
And the site has good reason to track carbon emissions. According to the Project’s website, the UK’s carbon footprint is more than 500 million tons of CO2 per year.
This technology has yet to step over to the United States. The good news is that, in the meantime, BP and other websites provide a basic calculator to track individual emissions.
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