Caluculate Your Carbon Footprint with WattzOn
I’ve tried to check my carbon footprint before with online calculators, but have never felt that my lifestyle was rightly represented in my results. One carbon calculator I tried didn’t have an option for not owning a car. Another was British and thus didn’t match on a number of aspects.
Today, however, I found WattzOn! WattzOn asks you a series of simple questions about your life and offers feedback on how much carbon your lifestyle produces. Plus, you can then compare it to other people.
WattzOn not only includes not owning a car as an option, but the site also asks you how many miles per week you use different forms of public transportation and factors that in to your number.
And get this: it asks you about your diet through an interactive slide-bar tool where you rank how much meat, milk, sugar, produce, etc. you consume. As you slide the bar from “average” to “none” for meat, your carbon impact number starts dropping quickly. You can also select vegan, vegetarian, lacto-ovo, or another of other dietary choices and have the site estimate your intake.
The calculator’s assumed average diet created 495 watts of carbon; the estimated vegan diet, only 339. When I reduced the beer and wine (I drink none) and sugar consumption level to match my diet, the number dropped to 259.
My total number, which included their average number for my household heating and electricity as my utilities are included in rent, was 5,246 watts. My number is almost half the average WattzOn user’s number!
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