Here’s How to Put Your Carbon Footprint Calculation on Autopilot
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A carbon footprint is one of the most straightforward ways to measure our impact on the planet. It accounts for the energy we use at home, how we travel, the food we eat, and even our purchasing habits, helping us understand how day-to-day choices leave their mark on the environment.
Often expressed in units of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), it helps us identify, reduce, and even mitigate our impact on the planet. After all, if we can’t measure it, we can’t reduce it.
The History of Carbon Footprint
The concept of a carbon footprint was developed in the early 1990s by Dr. William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel at the University of British Columbia. In the early 2000s, British Petroleum later co-opted the concept through a high-profile campaign to rebrand itself as an environmentally friendly company. This greenwashing effort included the “Beyond Petroleum” rebrand and the slogan, “It’s time to go on a carbon diet.” As part of the campaign, BP also launched the world’s first carbon footprint calculator, aiming to shift climate responsibility from large companies to individuals.
It’s time to reclaim our carbon footprints and use them the way they were first intended — as a metric to help us understand our biggest opportunities for collective impact. When we shrink our reliance on the highest-impact industries, we quickly find that we’re defunding fossil fuels, and carbon calculators help you figure out where to start.
Carbon Calculators and Their Limitations
A quick search for carbon calculators will turn up several options. These tools can help you pinpoint emissions you can control more directly, like home energy use or gasoline consumption. They often include free resources and ideas for how to reduce those emissions.
But personal footprints also include emissions tied to the supply chains of things we buy like groceries, clothing, cleaning and personal care products, and even less frequent purchases like bedding. Most carbon calculators don’t capture these.
Calculating them yourself is difficult, because you have to account for raw materials, production processes, transportation, packaging, and warehousing.
That’s what we’re simplifying at Commons.
Automating the Carbon Footprint of Your Purchases
In the Commons app, users link financial accounts (like debit cards and credit cards) to automatically see the carbon impact of their purchases. It’s a one-stop shop to budget dollars and the emissions of those dollars.
The app helps you track your carbon footprint, make more informed decisions, and ultimately reduce your climate impact.
Commons starts with a top-down, spend-based approach to emissions accounting. Spend-based methods take the dollar value of a purchase and multiply it by an emissions intensity factor (kg CO2e/$) to estimate its carbon impact.
Commons has mapped a rigorous dataset of emissions intensity factors to 180+ subcategories of consumer spending, nested under six high-level categories: Shopping, Travel, Home, Food & Drink, Finance, and Offsets.
When you spend on a particular category, the transaction is automatically categorized into the appropriate subcategory. If you notice an incorrect categorization, you can recategorize it, improving estimates not only for yourself, but for others with related transactions.
Rather than identifying the specific items you purchased, this approach uses national-level industry emissions data and estimates your share based on the amount spent.
For example, if you buy a chair for $50 and the average emissions intensity factor for furniture is 0.44 kg CO2e/$, Commons multiplies $50 by 0.44 to estimate the chair’s associated emissions (22 kgCO2e).
The app also captures the impact of sustainable choices:
- Shopping secondhand? Categorize shopping purchases as Vintage & Thrift to receive a 0 kg CO2e footprint for that purchase.
- Repairing goods instead of buying new ones? Buying fewer items typically means spending less, which results in a lower carbon footprint.
- Buying experiences instead of things? Physical goods often have higher emissions due to the supply chain required to produce them. Visiting a museum, park, or zoo will often generate a lower footprint than buying a piece of art or another physical item.
All you need to do is connect your bank account, and the app will track your purchases and nudge you toward more sustainable choices.
Note: When you connect your card(s) to Commons using Plaid, we cannot (and will not) charge your account, withdraw or transfer money, or create a transaction on the account in any way. We take your data privacy and security very seriously, and never sell your data.
Get Commons on the Play Store→
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