Green Gadget: Carbon Hero

Have you ever wondered about the size of your own carbon footprint?  What if there was a way that you could track your generation of CO2?  Well, now there is a new gadget (still in beta) that will help you with just that question.  It’s called Carbon Hero and is the brain child of Andreas Zachariah.  Last April, Oxford graduate student, Nick Burch, joined Zachariah to help him bring his vision to reality.

The purpose of this gadget is to help you track your CO2 (carbon dioxide) contribution on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.  By monitoring your output, you will tend to alter your behavior to see a better result on your cell phone.  That’s right, this application works on cell phones and is currently being tested by Nokia and Blackberry.  They believe that companies will use the Carbon Hero to track the effect on the environment from their business travel.

The Carbon Hero focuses on the environmental impact of your travel on a daily basis.  It uses satellite navigation data, a database and an algorithm, to calculate the effect of your method of travel.  Carbon Hero has won many awards including a regional prize in the 2007 European Satellite Navigation Competition and the British Standards Institute (BSI) prize for Sustainability Design.

For more information, check out the Carbon Hero web site or read the article on Science Daily.

Pretty soon, we can ask someone, “Hey, what’s your carbon footprint?”

~Melissa