Our Family Carbon Footprint

This last year's been a time of great change in our efforts to reduce our footprint.

Electric

We had to come off the green tariff (where all our electric effectively came from renewable sources). The reason being that the power companies all hiked their prices by 20% last year and we were looking for savings. For some reason, green tariffs are now 10% more than their non-green counterparts. Clearly the  energy companies were taking us for mugs, so we moved.

That unfortunately meant that our electric usage now appears on our footprint. The good news is that we've been cutting our electric usage anyway and we've had solar panels fitted. As a result, the 2.71 tonne footprint for electric has come down to 1.69. The panels would have accounted for about .6 of that 1.02 reduction.

Gas

This has come down from 3.4t to 2.7t in the last year, mainly due to our new loft insulation.

Clearly all this reduction in carbon footprint is also saving us money. In fact, we're paying less for our duel fuel bill than before the power company raised their prices. They even had to give us a refund and cut our direct debits. Result!

Travel

Switching jobs (not by choice) means I have to travel further to work. I decided to use the bus instead of the car but the increased mileage has pushed the footprint up here. The car usage total is 2.59t which is down slightly because I'm using the car less, however the bus adds .081t. So our total there is 3.4t, up from 2.63t (a difference of about .8t).

Solar Panels

The total saving from our panels is 1.63 tonnes. At the moment, we probably only use a third of the electric it generates, the rest goes back to the grid, which offsets 1.09t.

Secondary Footprint

This reflects our lifestyle choices and doesn't really change from year to year. It's unchanged at 4.0t.

Summary

Our total carbon footprint is 10.7t or 2.675 per person. If we left out the middle-class bling like our solar panels and the Prius, our footprint would be 13t or 3.25t pp. That's still considerably down on the average UK footprint of about 10t pp. Keeping our footprint this low is not only better for the climate but it saves us a fortune on energy bills.

If you want to calculate your footprint, try here.

More detail about how we do it.