Offset-C, better understand your carbon emissions

Offset-C

This tool helps you calculate a rough approximate of your carbon emissions to help you contribute to organisations working on offseting carbon and do your part in the battle against climate change

Inspiration

In a class on Environmental Science in my school I was tasked with finding out my day to day carbon footprint. This was something I had never batted an eye at before and it was the same for my classmates as well. It led me thinking how unaware we are of our own negative contribution to climate change yet we all considered ourselves climate-change "aware". This was the insiration behind this project as it might be just as useful to others as the formulas and data were to me.

What it does

It helps you calculate your carbon emissions based on the following formulas: ** total emissions = (electricity emission + fuel emission) x days

electricity emission = per day consumption * avgerage CO2 produced per kWh * percentage of power generated using non renewable resources in your country

fuel emission = (miles / mileage) * CO2 produced by buring 1L of gasoline **

How we built it

It was build using MecSlimCalc, the simplest way to build computational models. The essential data was sourced from the following sites:

Average CO2 per kWh: 475gCo2/kWh here

CO2 produced in burning 1L of gasoline: 2.3kg here

Percentage of power generated using non renewable resources (country wise): ourworldinddata.org

List of best carbon offset programs: here

Challenges we ran into

Sourcing the data and other relevant facts was the most time consuming as we had to plow through a sites and papers to find the best and most relevant informations for calculation.

A planned feature was to add the support for currencies and actually output the amount you could contribute to achieve a personal net zero carbon footprint, but the complexities of converting currencies and understanding how much of a contribution is needed based on country prevented from adding that feature. It's still in the works to make this app and all rounder.

What we learned

Truly shocking amount of carbon we emit just from simple day to day activities. That was huge. Apart from it, in the process I also learnt how to MecSlimCalc and it's pipeline. A small suggestion is the addition of a print line feature for faster debugging as currently we had to go to preview, provide inputs a wait even for a small bug.