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Estimating the carbon footprint of a product is more difficult than it sounds. British market Tesco is attempting to label the carbon footprint of all of its products. So far only one product has been labeled. Perhaps ThoughtAndMemory.org’s decentralized system will make accuracy in life cycle analysis easier in the long run.

Did you know that you can automatically estimate and offset the carbon footprint of the purchases that you make when you shop at climatecooler?

The problem is that, according to Michel Gelobter (Founder & CEO), Cooler treats any purchase that you make from a single store as having the same carbon footprint per dollar. That means that when you spend $1,000 on eBay, no matter what you’ve bought, Cooler will offset the same amount of carbon. Not exactly the best way to encourage carbon efficiency. But it’s a start!

Cooler reports to do a good job of purchasing carbon offsets that actually reduce CO2 release somewhere else. For example, they employ a third party to purchase a solar stove for a family that would otherwise be cooking with a bunsen burner. Other “offsets” such as investments in renewable energy still seem like good ideas even if they don’t specifically offset the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Here’s a site that is succeeding where Cooler fails and failing where they succeed. http://www.co2stats.com/ purchases renewable resources and provides detailed tracking of the sources of energy that a website uses. So they are not offsetting the carbon footprint of their clients (though they do use the word “offset”). But they are attempting a more exact energy source tally than Cooler is capable of.

If you would like to see the day when every carbon cost can be accounted for in the goods that you purchase then log on to ThoughtAndMemory.org’s main site and help us “Get Started”. Once we have a complete corporate model for a product’s construction, packaging, and delivery we’ll be able to accurately estimate the CO2 emissions that brings any product to your specific shopping cart. We’ll also be able to modify that estimate when companies change their processes (hopefully for the better.)

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 12:02 pm by Clay and is filed under Civic Media, Related News. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.