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Get your greendex

How ‘green’ are you? Now there’s a very simple (and therefore surely inaccurate, but probably not too misleading) online questionaire you can take (from National Geographic), to make you feel smug or worried about your carbon footprint (most of us in the London office wound up with a smug, above-average Greendex score, though that’s probably because none of us own a car…).

Working out the environmental pros and cons of various activities is notoriously difficult and at times counterintuitive. A report in Nature once concluded, for example, that it’s better to use a styrofoam cup than a mug for your daily coffee, until you had used the same mug over a thousand times – that’s thanks to the high-energy-use manufacture of ceramic, and the hot water and soap needed to wash your mug; in contrast styrofoam is easy to make, and causes no problems in landfill other than taking up space (Nature abstract, full text not online; .html">New Scientist story). At least with carbon emissions there’s no need to quantify some amorphous ‘bad’ thing like ‘taking up space in landfill’ – carbon emissions are carbon emissions (well, the carbon could be in methane or carbon dioxide, with differing climate effects, but lets not be too picky). But it’s still hard to assess with simple questions like “Do you own a car” exactly what this means for your emissions.

Nonetheless, I’m all for raising awareness of carbon footprints – so long as it doesn’t make people who get a ‘good’ score think they don’t need to strive for improvement.

Here are some more, similar surveys:

Carbon offset survey, run by Environmental Economics MSc students at Imperial College, London.

Test your knowledge on environmental questions, with a quiz from Yale University, Forbes, and the BBC.

Tell us of your favourites…

Comments

  1. Report this comment

    Chris Cluff said:

    Maybe it has already been done, but I’d love to see the cost / benefit ratio of many of the “green” technologies that are coming to the fore. For example, everyone seems to love the “greenness” of

    hybrid cars, but I have to wonder whether the modest gain in gas mileage actually lowers the carbon footprint of the car when one considers amount of energy that went into making (and ultimately, recycling or disposal) the huge battery required for this technology. Plus, unlike my 1986 Toyota pickup, which I’m expecting to drive well over 200K miles, these cars need to have the battery replaced every 100K miles, which doubles that particular negative impact on green. Another example is solar cell technology, which must have steep energy costs for manufacture with the rare metals and all, but are only discussed with regard to the “clean” energy they produce. Maybe we need every “green” product to be described in terms of “years of use (or miles travelled or whatever) required to show carbon footprint benefit versus old technology”. Or something like that.

  2. Report this comment

    Roger Carthew said:

    Establishing the comparative environmental credentials of a product or service are fraught with innumerable challenges. Life Cycle Analysis is the method and often the results are not quite what you would like to hear.

    The only sure fire way to do something good for the environment is to use less of something. Less electricity, water, petrol, or what ever it is that you use.

    It’s quite simple really. Where you would use two or three of something, use one to do the same job.

    You’ll be surprised how often you can do this and be successful.

    Roger Carthew

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