My CO2 Footprint

To get a more accurate picture of which parts of my life emit how much CO2¹, I tried to estimate my personal CO2 emissions for the last two years. Spoiler alert, which everybody knows already: flying sucks.

As tools for the calculation of my emissions I used the CO2 calculator of the Umweltbundesamt (UBA) (Federal Environment Agency) in combination with the atmosfair calculator for the calculation of flight emissions. The UBA calculator is quite well done: it starts with a quick check, the rough results of which can then be worked out in more detail in the second step, you don’t have to click through different pages and you get directly the respective emissions of each activity and also the comparison to the average German. You can also share the results (here you can find my balance without the flight emissions, which I calculated with atmosfair). I can’t tell you how exactly the emissions are calculated and if all emission groups relevant are included, but it seems to make sense to me. In addition, I have tried the CO2 calculator from WWF, but it lacks all the above points and I would therefore not recommend it.

But now for the results: In 2019, my emissions were very large, around 13.9 tons of CO2 - driven by air travel, which accounted for almost 70% of annual emissions. Due to my internship in Singapore, I flew a relatively large amount, both professionally and privately. The intercontinental roundtrip from Düsseldorf to Singapore had the biggest impact, with around 5.5 tons - significantly more than my entire annual consumption in 2020². For comparison the german average yearly emission is 11.17 tons according to the UBA-calculator.

Figure 1: Personal Emissions 2019 & 2020

The remaining emissions for 2019 and 2020 are largely identical. The largest shares are food (approx. 1.7 tons) and material consumer goods such as clothing or electronics (approx. 1.1 tons). When I cook, I eat a vegetarian diet as much as possible and instead of milk I often use oat milk. When I am on the road, however, I often have meat dishes. Here I could certainly still save some CO2.

As for the estimation of material consumer goods emissions, I am somewhat skeptical about how accurately the CO2 calculator can determine them. Based on the data (including consumer spending, purchasing behavior, purchasing criteria) that I have entered, the calculator comes to about 1.1 tons of CO2. However, emissions propably differ extremly by product and cannot be accuratley predicted just using this data. There are some companies that determine and publish the CO2 footprint of their products (e.g. Apple). However, these are in the minority and as a consumer I would like to see more transparency here. It is somewhat understandable that a small electronics company, which manufactures products in small series, does not manage a CO2 certification, but from global brands with mass products this is should be mandatory.

Because I lived in an energetically fully renovated 2-person flat with a central heat pump with heat recovery from industrial wastewater flow and we used only about 800 kWh of green electricity, my living emissions are significantly lower than the average, almost non existent (not counting the 3.5 months in an air-conditioned apartment in Singapore). Outside of flying, my transport emissions are also low, due to the almost exclusive use of public transport. Finally, the UBA calculator assigns almost 0.9 tons of so-called public emissions to each citizen. These are emissions from the public sector such as education, healthcare or administration.

2021 will probably be about the same as 2020. I don’t have any air travel planned either, but housing emissions will increase significantly since I now live in an older poorly insulated building with instantaneous water heaters for hot water. Let’s see what difference that makes.

FOOTNOTES