greengatsby.com » valentines http://greengatsby.com thinking. sustainably. Fri, 11 Jan 2013 22:30:02 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 Footprints of Love http://greengatsby.com/footprints-of-love/ http://greengatsby.com/footprints-of-love/#comments Tue, 14 Feb 2012 17:09:47 +0000 Brock http://greengatsby.com/?p=239 All great romances must eventually turn their eyes away from each other and look toward the bleak face of reality to ask the question:

How is this relationship impacting the environment, anyway?

These can be trying times, and that is a complex question, for any two people to answer.  A process based carbon footprint may be too complicated, its scope too focused, its data collection too time consuming. Fortunately, there is another way.


Economically based Input Output models (IO) are useful tools that generate carbon footprints for complex systems with minimal amount of data collection and minimal amount of time.  IOs use sector based carbon data to generate a complete, albeit fuzzy picture of a carbon footprint.So, this Valentine’s Day, I completed an input output based carbon footprint of my relationship. I have allocated capital goods (such as my car) according their application within the relationship, and I have included some approximations based on annual average uses within my geography (such as therms/household). I considered my relationship to be the overarching process, with four smaller processes as inputs: travel, wine and dine, gifts and food.  The result is right around 8,000 kg of CO2e-right around double the average annual per person emissions of China. As you can see, travel is a major carbon contributor to my romantic endeavors, and is certainly worth some scrutiny if I wanted a more granular footprint.

This economically based approach to carbon footprinting and life cycle assessment does not give a microscopic view of each process, but does provide an accurate summary of operational impacts. This model serves as a great baseline for corporations to identify their largest impacts, and they can iteratively refine their data with more precise numbers as is appropriate.  For my Valentine’s Day footprint, it looks as if I should investigate my travel and food sourcing more carefully (The largest contributor in this sector happens to be a plane ticket to South America where my girlfriend was studying sustainable aquaculture this summer.)  Tools like this can provide heat maps for supply chains and could possibly remediate problems that retailers such as Tesco have had in generating life cycle data for their vast product inventory.

So, this Valentine’s day remember: you can’t buy love, but you can buy carbon credits to offset it.

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