carbon offsetting for products

Introduction

In this section we look at carbon offsetting for large products, such as cars, boats and planes.

These items can represent very significant carbon footprints and therefore need to be handled with care.

If you have already offset your lifestyle, then any purchase that falls within your usual annual expenditure is already covered. However, expenditure on large purchases such as these tend to fall outside that definition, meaning that you are right to consider purchasing specific offsets.

If you have not yet offset your lifestyle then it might be an idea to do that, in addition to purchasing offsets for these products.

Products

The easiest way to quantify these emissions is to allocate you spend in USD to the various product categories.

Instructions

1. Start with your total spend on products in USD.

2. Allocate your spend to the following categories, putting any remainder in ‘other’.

3. Multiply each spend by the emissions factor for each product category to get the emissions value for each in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent (kgCO2e).

4. Add up all of the emissions from the different categories to get your total emissions.

5. Divide this by 92 to get the number of trees needed to offset your emissions and reach carbon neutral status.

6. Multiply by 4 to get the cost in USD.

Cars = 0.218
Boats = 0.266
Planes = 0.374
Other = 0.240

Example :

You spend USD 100,000 on a new car. The manufacture of this vehicle is responsible for (USD 100,000 x 0.218) = 21,800 kgCO2e. This can be offset by planting (21,800 / 92) = 236 tropical trees, at a cost of (236 x USD 4) = USD 944.

Once you have undertaken your calculations, all you need to do is take a note of the number of trees and click on this link to purchase your offsets.

Next section

Projects

Learn about the concept of carbon offsetting and visit our projects in tropical Africa.