The chances are you produce more carbon than you thought.

By now, you’ve probably heard that SKOOT enables people to easily offset their carbon (for free) by planting trees for you whenever you drive.

You might be thinking, but I don’t drive so my carbon emissions must be low. Well, you would be surprised by the activities that actually do release CO2 into the atmosphere. Doing a Google search, drinking a glass of wine, everything we do has an impact, so the more we can offset and reduce our contribution to this the better for the planet.

More often than not there is a sustainable alternative to the way we live, but what if I told you even when using sustainable alternatives carbon is produced. Like the fact that carbon would be produced even if you choose to cycle over driving? A suggested alternative to driving is taking public transport or to cycle, but you still produce carbon into the atmosphere. Here’s an example, according to the book How Bad is Bananas, if you were to cycle from London to Glasgow you would produce 30KG of CO2 and when travelling by train, it would produce 64KG CO2.

Taking public transport or riding a bike might not be an option for many people. Maybe it’s because they have kids that need to be dropped off or live too far away to walk or cycle to work or they may just not live near a train station! You might have no choice but to drive, but you do have the choice and the responsibility to do it carbon negatively. And even better you can share lefts with people and reduce the amount of cars on the road!

A quote from How Bad Are Bananas said:

“Put more people in the car — or even join a car-sharing scheme. A car full of people can compete in emissions with train travel if you are avoiding 4 separate journeys. Typically saving 50–80%”.

Pretty much everyone has a smart phone these days and almost anything is accessible at the click of a button (even offsetting your carbon 😎). But even when you go on your phone you are emitting carbon, and I’m sure most of us can say we go on our phone each day for longer than an hour… Go on check your screen time and let’s see how many hours you spend on your phone.

If you spend around 195 minutes on your phone you would produce 69KG of CO2 but if you spend 10 hours on your phone you contribute 86KG of carbon dioxide. Now I know this may not seem like much but if you imagine everyone in the whole world doing this it all adds up! It has been found that the global mobile phone usage contributes 690 million tonnes of carbon a year — an absolutely huge number! Let me put this into perspective — that’s nearly 850 thousand 4,000kg elephants entering the atmosphere a DAY. To put this even more into perspective there are only a total of 440 thousand elephants on the earth.

Let’s look at another staggering carbon fact. We all need food to survive but what you eat has a huge impact on the environment. According to How Bad are Bananas (yes, we love that book), if you are a vegan who makes sure each week there is no food waste and are also eating with the British season (so no lettuces from Peru) you will only produce 17 kg of CO2. Compared to this, the average person who eats an diet including meat, with no concern for where their food comes from, will produce around 88kg of CO2 a week.

Eating more consciously can hugely reduce the amount of carbon produced but there is still the issue of food waste. According to WRAP around 22% of food goes straight into landfills. The rotting food will generate emissions, and the unnecessary production of food we don’t use means we are cutting down forests to make more space for crops to grow, for food that isn’t even eaten.

There are so many little things we can do in our lives to limit the carbon mark we leave on the planet. This might be something as small as decreasing the average hours we spend on our phone, buying seasonal foods and just informing ourselves on what our carbon footprint looks like. Living conscious lives is not just for eco-warriors, it’s something we all need to start embracing if we all want a planet to live on in the future.

Our favourite way to reduce carbon, is of course to offset it. When it is super easy to do and completely free you simply have nothing to lose. Here at SKOOT we are driving the carbon negative movement and want as many people as possible to be part of this movement.

What are you waiting for?