Get savvy about your carbon footprint with Mukti Mitchell

Want to take control of your personal carbon footprint? Then, we’ve got the solution for you. Our new carbon footprint calculator tells you just how much carbon you emit, and in which areas of your life, so you can see where you can most easily swap it for a green footprint. It’s designed by Mukti Mitchell, the founder of Carbon Savvy, who has been building award-winning carbon calculators for the last 20 years. Our founder, Lucy Johnson, sat down with him to discuss why finding out our own carbon footprint can be a game-changer.

Switching to an EV like Polestar is a win for your carbon footprint

Tracking your own personal carbon footprint can feel daunting. But if you’re concerned about climate change and wondering what you can do about it, working out your carbon footprint can be a good starting point. Particularly as swapping it out for a green footprint is becoming easier and easier.

Mukti Mitchell runs Carbon Savvy, a company that works to support individuals, councils and companies to get to Net Zero. We’ve just partnered with him to bring you the Green Salon/Carbon Savvy carbon calculator so you can calculate your own carbon footprint.

If I am new to a Carbon Footprint Calculator, how does it actually work?

Your carbon footprint is the amount of carbon dioxide that is emitted from all your activities, over a year. The calculator asks you how you heat your home, about your car and how many miles you do, how many flights you take, how you source your food, and how much you spend on a range of major goods and services. It then tells you your total carbon footprint for the year. The Carbon Savvy calculator works with six major lifestyle areas: home heating, transport, food, shopping, holidays and our share of national infrastructure, such as education, health and defence.  Once you know what your carbon footprint is and where the emissions are coming from, it's much easier to find ways to reduce them.

Does it matter if I don't exactly know all the answers and broadly guess? I don’t really remember how much I spend on household items or how many miles I travel by bus.

It’s fine if you don't have exact answers.  If it's your first time you will just want to get a broad idea of how it works and how much CO2 your different activities emit. However, when it comes to saving CO2, the more accurate your carbon footprint is this year the better it will reflect any small changes you make, so when you do it again in the second and third year you’ll get more satisfaction for how much CO2 you have saved.

Some people argue that individual carbon footprints are a conspiracy to take the blame off Big Oil - who incidentally coined the term. What's your take on this?

There is lots of debate over who is responsible for reducing CO2 emissions. On the one hand, big corporations & oil companies use advertising to persuade us to buy more products, have bigger houses and have bigger footprints, so they should be responsible for reducing emissions. At Carbon Savvy we are interested in where the power lies, and we think individuals have more power. For example, supermarkets offer organic and non-organic foods. If more people buy non-organic food and the supermarket doesn’t sell it, all their business will go to other supermarkets and they will go bust. But most individuals have a lot of choice about which products and services they buy. 

In the last few years people around the world have started buying sustainable products if they don’t cost hugely more, and this shift in consumer purchasing habits may do more to avert climate change than government policies. We think that real power lies in the hands of individuals, so we offer carbon footprint calculations and courses on how to reduce your carbon footprint. Individuals care about their children, which means they also have the greatest motivation to change.

Buying organic food has a positive impact on our personal carbon footprint.

There is an argument that carbon offsetting is often ineffective. But the Green Salon/Carbon Savvy calculator suggests JustCarbon as a reliable offset. Can you explain why you think it's worth offsetting with them?

It’s true there have been a lot of imperfect schemes and whilst offsetting is now more regulated and legitimate, there are still some poor quality schemes out there. But thanks to the concept of carbon offsets every year billions of pounds go from corporations to nature regeneration projects all over the world, saving billions of tonnes of CO2. We have left it so late to reduce global carbon emissions that I believe offsetting is essential to avert catastrophic climate change.  Therefore I advise individuals and organisations to find the best quality carbon offsets you can and offset your carbon footprint.  We partner with JustCarbon because their offsets are certified by Gold Standard and Verra, widely regarded as the two highest standards in the world. They also work with the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA) which ensures that there are no detrimental effects to local communities and biodiversity near the offset schemes. 

As with anything, watch out for very cheap offsets as these may be less trustworthy and have more negative side effects. JustCarbon offsets are priced at £25- £30 per tonne. That means you can offset a typical carbon footprint of 15 tonnes for £375 per year. If you consider that spending this money makes you carbon neutral, which means significantly reducing your contribution to climate change, it's a very reasonable price.  Carbon reductions are still absolutely important and as you reduce your carbon footprint, the cost of your offset goes down!

Mukti with his mother and father, Satish Kumar, the peace-pilgrim, activist and author

You’ve spent years designing carbon footprint calculators. How do you work it all out? 

Some parts are easy and some parts are difficult. Every year the government publishes CO2 emissions factors for all the big items such as heating fuels, cars, public transport and flights. Most of these are fairly accurate but we do add an additional factor for flight emissions because we don't think the government data matches best science in this area. 

The Office of National Statistics publishes CO2 emissions for over 100 types of goods and services, based on spend. We group these into 10-15 categories to make it easier for users. Food is the most complex because industrial farming has a far higher footprint than small scale organic farming to produce the same foods. Remember, the objective of a carbon footprint calculator is not to give the most accurate carbon calculation but to help us make lifestyle choices that reduce our emissions. There is a trade off between accuracy and user-friendliness, and Carbon Savvy is widely regarded as having struck the best balance between these two.

Any last comments? 

At Carbon Savvy we are always keen to make the connection between increasing your quality of life and reducing your carbon footprint. Many of the activities people really love have low carbon footprints. I personally have been testing this for 25 years and my quality of life has improved dramatically, so I believe that as we move towards 2050 lifestyles we are going to be spending more and more time doing the things we love and being happier, healthier and wealthier. 

Curious about your own carbon footprint? You can calculate it here.

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