Climate change Carbon footprint of common consumer products

Maciamo

Maciamo

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Everything you buy has an impact of CO2 emissions and climate change. But every product is different. Find out the carbon footprint of various types of clothes, furniture, electronics, household appliances, cars and more in this new article.

Carbon footprint of common consumer products

 
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Maciamo said:
Here is the carbon footprint (in Co2-equivalent) from the manufacturing of some common electronic products. This is the CO2 impact from buying a new device. It does not include the electric consumption from usage. I prefer not to include the CO2e from usage as this depends on how green your electricity is. If, like me, you have a contract for 100% renewable green electricity, then the carbon footprint from electric consumption is negligible.


  • Smartphone : 50 kg of CO2e
  • TV : 300 kg
  • Computer : 350~400 kg

Unfortunately I couldn't find the manufacturing carbon footprint of any household appliance.
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This can not possibly be right... :sad-2:

Kudos for the 100% renewable electricity contract.
Humanity will be better off when more people can afford and have that option.

Just a silly question, what is the CO2 footprint of renewable energy? Is it breakeven, positive or negative?

Edit: Did my own research. The answer is complicated far beyond what I imagined, and clear answers can not be found on non biased sources, meanwhile academically published/govt reports zic zac around the subject.
One thing is sure, renewable lowers CO2 footprint by orders of magnitude. The other sure thing is that not even going 100% renewable energy will lower CO2 emissions to 0. So... yeah. Plant a tree or two.
 
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There are also plenty of websites to calculate your carbon footprint. Here are some of the best.



The way of calculating is quite different. I am getting 4 tonnes of CO2e with the first (and probably most accurate), 5.8 tonnes with the second, and 8.6 tonnes with the third. Anyway, even taking the highest value I would need to plant 215 trees per year to offset my carbon footprint. Using the cheaper option (0.1€ per tree), that barely 21.5€ per year. Almost nothing. Yet if everybody did it our future would look brighter.

I used Carbon Footprint to calculate the CO2e of all the flights I have taken in my life, all the car kilometres I have driven, and all the gas (for heating) consumption in my adult life (by converting the KWh to CO2e). I have now planted enough trees on Tree-Nation to offset all these emissions + all the CO2e from personal belongings. In other words I have become a CO2 neutral individual. :)
 
Maciamo said:
There are also plenty of websites to calculate your carbon footprint. Here are some of the best.



The way of calculating is quite different. I am getting 4 tonnes of CO2e with the first (and probably most accurate), 5.8 tonnes with the second, and 8.6 tonnes with the third. Anyway, even taking the highest value I would need to plant 215 trees per year to offset my carbon footprint. Using the cheaper option (0.1€ per tree), that barely 21.5€ per year. Almost nothing. Yet if everybody did it our future would look brighter.

I used Carbon Footprint to calculate the CO2e of all the flights I have taken in my life, all the car kilometres I have driven, and all the gas (for heating) consumption in my adult life (by converting the KWh to CO2e). I have now planted enough trees on Tree-Nation to offset all these emissions + all the CO2e from personal belongings. In other words I have become a CO2 neutral individual. :)
Click to expand...

Leading by example. Well done.

It would be quite hard for me to figure out my carbon footprint, but maybe I can get a sensibly close estimate. Can barely recall what flight I took this year, let alone long ago.

Also, 20$ a year. Sounds like this needs to become compulsory :). Maybe priced in the price of the goods and services, and automatiaclly planted on our behalf. But I shudder to think of the corruption with such thing in the Balkans.

Also, I wonder if they calculate it with a coefficient for the success rate of the planted trees. Some of them I assume do not make it. But overall in the long run, this might be offset by natural seeding that might go on, in the little forest you have planted ;)
 
Archetype0ne said:
It would be quite hard for me to figure out my carbon footprint, but maybe I can get a sensibly close estimate. Can barely recall what flight I took this year, let alone long ago.
Click to expand...

I couldn't remember all my flights either, especially on routes I used more than twice. So I checked my emails for flights and counted the results. Only took a few minutes. A bit longer to encode each route in the carbon calculator and add up the total. I made an Excel spreadsheet to list each flight's CO2e and automatically make the sum of everything.
 
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