Green Your Team With The Carbon Footprint Challenge

With new tools available to help people measure their carbon footprint at home and work, collective action and friendly competition are bringing carbon footprint challenges to the workplace.

Carbon footprint is a measure of the amount of greenhouse gas emissions based on fossil fuel consumption per individual or group. Greenhouse gases are fueling climate change.

The challenges of our everyday lives are the number of products and services we use to support our busy lives. It’s easy to make one or two small changes, but without measuring and taking the full picture into consideration, we may not be doing as well as possible. Any anyone who has ever kept a diet diary knows that just the act of writing it down increases awareness.

Doing personal carbon footprints in the workplace, and then calculating a team or group number can bring a fun spirit of competition to green team building. Workplaces can sponsor a competition for the largest drop in carbon footprint numbers between workplaces over a period of time, or reward a workplace by dropping the carbon footprint of the entire business by the end of the year or holiday.

To measure a carbon footprint across a group, the same calculator should be used for all employees. Several are available online. Carbonfootprint.com is very comprehensive and is free. In order to calculate the personal carbon footprint, people will need their utility bills and be able to access budget numbers. As well as direct fossil fuel use, such as heating oil and gas for transportation, the measure looks at the consumption of consumer goods, such as clothing and eating out, that are known to be high in fossil fuel use.

Measuring personal carbon footprints can help individuals fine tune their energy conservation efforts, and can encourage green team building.