Oct/Nov 2008

What kind of carbon footprint is created by your personal travel patterns? A new Anglo-Dutch company called Carbon Hero is hoping to help you find out.

Its product is a software-based system that runs on a variety of GPS-equipped smartphones including BlackBerry and Nokia Nseries models. It attempts to track your travel and calculate the resulting CO2 emissions or 'carbon footprint' automatically.

What's clever about it is that it automatically detects whether you're in a road vehicle, a plane or some other type of vehicle. You do have to enter your car model (or possibly truck model), but then the system takes over.

The software stores data on movement, velocity, transport mode and other unspecified factors to arrive at your total carbon footprint. It then compares that against different averages, and calculates recent improvements – or bad carbon-related behaviour.

 

For the technically minded, it uses McObject's Perst Lite embedded database, taking advantage of its small footprint.

It's the brainchild of two developers, Andreas Zachariah and Nick Burch, who have created it under the aegis of the technology business incubator an the European Space Agency. Last year they won a BSI Sustainability Design Award for the initial version of their product.

They see it as ideal for companies measuring the carbon footprint of mobile staff, and say they would like to see the system pre-installed on smartphones eventually. There seems to be no indication at this stage of what it might cost.