Have you ever wondered what carbon calculators are? There seem to be so many of them online these days that it's hard to decide which one is better than any other. Perhaps the answer is, the best one is the one that addresses your concerns or fits your business.

What does that mean? Well, there are sites that are dedicated to consumer carbon footprints, and these tend to be simpler, more user friendly sites. On the other hand there are sites that look at commercial carbon footprints, and these sometimes require quite involved information to be available.

We looked at a few to find out what they were like, how easy they were to use and the information on carbon footprints that was fed back to the user once all the questions were answered. Of course, our findings are subjective and everyone will have a different opinion. However, we think the sites below are some of the better ones we found. Clicking on the titles will take you directly to thes sites mentioned.

Nothing in this post should be taken to be an endorsement of any of these sites or their information.  TRACOUK has no affiliation or relationship with any of the sites mentioned here. 

Climate Hero 

With it's simple graphics and ease of use this is a nice, friendly calculator aimed at people interested in calculating their domestic carbon footprint. It looks at three broad categories:

Housing

Travel

Consumption

At the end of the test it asks some useful questions about what actions you might consider to reduce your carbon footprint. The test itself takes around 5 minutes to do so it's quick and easy and produces a report you can download. It does ask for a contribution which may or may not be based on the responses to the questions. We didn't take up that option.

The only issue we found as we went through was a question in the travel section regarding the number of cars in a household. As we were using sample data to look at the site so it didn't directly affect our test, but it might slightly affect the overall carbon footprint value the report gives out.

Carbon Neutral Britain

This is a calculator aimed at businesses. It asked 8 questions based around staffing, waste and vehicles. We can't comment on the output of this one as it wanted us to sign up to receive the report. As we were using test data it would not have provided us with any meaningful output that we could take action on.

However, there is a lot of information on the site that would be useful for businesses to review as carbon reporting and reduction becomes ever more important.

Carbon Footprint

The company have been in existence for over 20 years and have developed several different calculators covering not only domestic carbon footprint calculation, but they also commercial calculators that either for small or growing businesses, or larger corportations. Some options are free to use depending on need and size, however an account needs to be set up to use the tools.

Alternatively, at the bottom of the calculator page is what they call their 'Classic' calculator'. This covers a wide range of potential items that can affect a carbon footprints, and it can be used either by an organisation or an individual. The calculator is able to look at one particular item for example, flights, and then narrow that down to a particular period in time, making it flexible and focused.

We didn't test this calculator. Instead we've included it here as an example of a calculator that can cover various scenarios.

Other Options

Finally, what about calculating your footprint yourself? There are plenty of resources out there to help you do just that. The .GOV website publishes annual metrics that can be used to create a spreadsheet to work it out, or quite often utility bills will contain a figure showing carbon generated from using electricity, water etc. 

For domestic use, there are several sites out there that offer either a downloadable spreadsheet, or an Excel addin and many of these are free to use. For businesses, some of the utility companies have free downloadable tools that can be used to calculate a carbon footprint, and there are also sites that offer spreadsheets for businesses to use. 

There is a plethora of information out there. So we believe its not a case of 'why should I do worry about calculating it' but 'where can I look to start calculating it?' Whilst carbon calculation and footprints etc. is a huge subject, it's easy to make a start. With the wealth of knowledge already available, if one calculator or method doesn't meet your needs, there are plenty of others available to choose from.

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