Greenbook and my Carbon Footprint: YYZ to PVG
I saw a Greenbook Facebook application on Alysia’s profile page and thought I would check out what all the fuss was about. It’s an application that claims to purchase Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) with money generated from sponsorship. Its past sponsors were TeeCrush, TerraPass and The Experience Project. Looking over its past purchases it started a year ago but no purchases of RECs were made for the past two months, so it looks like it’s no longer active.
I thought I would visit Greenbook’s supplier, 3Degrees Inc., and learn more about RECs when I came across a carbon footprint calculator. Carbon footprint calculators are to me like the thousands of online personality tests to others. I decided to find out the carbon footprint of my flight to Shanghai. According to 3Degrees’ Carbon Footprint Calculator, my round-trip flight from Toronto to Shanghai is going to cost me 10,513 pounds of CO2. That’s equivalent to the annual carbon footprint of a small home. It’s too bad I can’t walk to China.
I’ve never been able to trust anyone who had extreme beliefs, and I am inclined to say that the CO2 calculation by that website is probably biased or skewed. Naturally, that means I ran the numbers myself instead of doing work this morning.
1) Air Canada Flt #87, direct from Toronto to Shanghai, occurs on a B777-200LR according to flightaware.com.
2) According to section 2 of the tech specs from the Boeing website, this plane has a fuel capacity of 47,890 gallons of fuel and seats between 279 – 370 people depending of the class configuration. Estimate it at 335 for “averaging” purposes.
3) According to Appendix F of the US Dept. of Energy’s “Form EIA-1605EZ”, 18.4 lbs of CO2 are emitted per gallon of Aviation fuel combusted. (That’s about 2.2 kg / L)
4) Assuming that your plane burned 100% of its fuel stores (so you glided into the airport), that means your flight emitted a maximum of 881 176 lbs of CO2. The maximum variable CO2 emissions per person per flight is about 2630 lbs (1195 kg).
5) Round trip, the maximum possible TRUE CO2 emissions from aviation fuel would be **** 5260 lbs (2390 kg) ****, although this number is high since we made some generous assumptions.
6) The factor of 2 difference between this number and the website number is (upon further investigation) due to a radiative forcing index that their methodology uses. But that’s just a whole new can of worms.
7) coloradotrees.org says that each tree absorbs 48 lbs of CO2 per year, meaning that to offset, you’ll need about 110 tree-years.
So now that you have the numbers, it’s not so bad huh? 5 trees. 22 years. That’s the “eco-cost” of your flight.
Thanks for the recalculations, it makes me feel a bit better. Just a bit though! I can always count on you to procrastinate from work. :p