Track Your Carbon Footprint With Ecobot

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Everyone has a different theory on the best ways to be “green” and environment-friendly, but it’s hard to know where to start until you know how energy-efficient you already are. It’s fairly easy to figure out the carbon footprint of, say, your car, but what about smaller things like your computer or paper usage?

ECOBOT is a free, open source Adobe AIR application that watches your fuel, paper, and power consumption to help you determine where you’re having the most negative impact on the environment and what you’re doing right.

If you’re running ECOBOT on a laptop, it tracks wireless networks wherever you go to calculate the distance you’ve covered and then prompts you to enter your method of travel. Alternatively, you can load the app onto your desktop computer, then simply add your travel data manually.

ECOBOT logs how much paper you use by tracking the number of pages you print, along with manually-entered information about paper items like newspapers and magazines that you’ve bought. The app also automatically monitors the energy consumption of your computer and any other home or office power sources you let it know you’re using.

Created by Canadian company TAXI, Vice-chair Jane Hope says, “The application raises our awareness of our carbon consumption, which will, hopefully, lead to a change in our habits. We hope that individuals and organizations will be inspired to offset their carbon output in a meaningful way by either reducing high carbon-consuming activities or purchasing carbon offsets.”