Know your carbon footprint

Sustainable Saratoga has partnered with CURE100 to offer local residents a free online tool to track their carbon emissions and use those results to help reduce their impact on the environment

Here’s how to accurately determine your Carbon Footprint with Sustainable Saratoga’s new Carbon Tracker App

Our everyday activities inevitably have some kind of environmental impact, and the choices we make in transportation, home heating and cooling, and even diet produce some level of carbon emissions, which are having potentially devastating effects on our planet. But we can reduce our emissions by making more thoughtful personal choices. By using the CURE100 Carbon Tracker app, you can discover specifically what your biggest sources of emissions are and find ways to reduce them—which will not only help reduce your carbon footprint, but at the same time improve your health and save you money.

Here’s how it works. Go to the Carbon Tracker app link on the Sustainable Saratoga website and log in with your Google account (or create one if you don’t have one). The app will ask you to create a personal profile and then answer a detailed questionnaire that will help you measure your household’s carbon footprint and identify its component sources. The questions are organized into five major carbon sources:

The results that are calculated will help you decide what carbon-reducing actions would most make sense for you to implement, and you can easily prioritize various suggestions based on the results of your questionnaire. The Carbon Tracker also compares your emissions with those of others in your ZIP code to help you easily identify those areas where you are currently successful and those you may want to improve. In a future release of the Carbon Tracker app, it will also explain how to balance carbon reduction against projected costs and expected savings over time.

The more accurate the information that is entered, the better the results, so Sustainable Saratoga provides a number of resources to help you accurately answer the questionnaire, such as a checklist of the information you’ll need to gather beforehand (download PDF here) and email support will be available.

Your profile will be saved to your account so you can re-take the questionnaire after a period of time and see how the changes you’ve made have affected your carbon footprint.

Sustainable Saratoga and CURE100 are 100% committed to your privacy, so your questionnaire results are not shared with or are accessible to anyone other than the individual using the tracker. Comparisons to other households are only made using data collected in aggregate, with no personal information attached.

Get started today! Stay tuned to the Sustainable Saratoga newsletter or https://sustainablesaratoga.org for updates and any upcoming “walk-through” events.