Calculate Your Carbon Footprint

Summary: Calculate your current carbon footprint to gain ideas for future steps.

Description

Learning about your carbon footprint is a helpful step for planning actions to take to reduce your emissions. Each step, no matter how small to start, gets us moving together along the path to reach net zero.

Read more about Franklin as a Green Community under the Deep Dive tab.

Deep Dive

What is net zero? Net zero is a goal for negating the amount of greenhouse gases from human activity. Greenhouse gasses include carbon dioxide, but also other gasses like methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorinated gasses. The goal is to reduce emissions as much as possible and to offset the remaining amount. Reductions are a crucial part and will be achieved through a combination of personal and institutional actions. Massachusetts has committed to a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and Net Zero emissions by 2050. More information on the decarbonization road map can be found here. The climate crisis is indeed an emergency, but we have an opportunity to plan for and take action towards a brighter future.

Massachusetts created the Green Communities Designation and Grant Program as part of the Department of Energy Resources to help communities find green energy solutions. Franklin has been a Green Community since 2018. Many initiatives have been implemented to help make Franklin more sustainable. Currently, over 90% of electricity used in schools and municipal buildings comes from the solar farm on Upper Union Street. All lights in municipal and school buildings and all streetlights now use LEDs. The town has two fully electric municipal vehicles and three charging stations have been installed at town hall, with an additional station at the public library. You can find out more about Franklin's actions as a Green Community here and even read the town's Energy Reduction Plan.

Steps to Take

There are many versions of carbon footprint calculators out there online. The EPA has one available for your household. It looks at home energy, transportation, and waste and provides useful tips for changes you can make.

1. One of the most trustworthy and used calculators is the "Berkeley Calculator" created by the Cool Climate Network. Go here for the household carbon footprint calculator.
2. There's also a business calculator. Go here to calculate the carbon footprint for a business. You can identify your carbon dioxide (CO2) output and even compare against similar households or businesses. 
3. Take the pledge at the end of the calculator to complete actions that will help lower your carbon footprint. There's some ideas for actions you may be able to complete on the actions page. Even if you start with smaller changes, those are great for providing forward momentum!
4. Let us know how it went by leaving a Testimonial under the tab above!

Our site uses quite a few of the Berkeley Calculator’s principles and estimates in our own carbon calculator. Where is that? When you sign up with Energize Franklin, you will find the calculator in your profile. As you add To-do’s to your list and completed actions to your Completed list, the calculator will show you the impacts of your activities. Watch our carbon savings grow and together we can make a difference.