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‘People have a lot of power’: A new app offers tangible ways to lower your carbon footprint

Zerofy tracks your emissions in real time and makes it far easier to shrink your personal footprint.

‘People have a lot of power’: A new app offers tangible ways to lower your carbon footprint

[Image: Zerofy]

BY Adele Peters2 minute read

If you ride your bike to work instead of driving, a new app automatically notes the difference as it tracks your daily emissions. The app, called Zerofy, aims to estimate emissions as precisely as possible—and then make it easier to shrink your footprint directly, without relying on offsets.

Other carbon footprint apps on the market typically try to sell offsets from projects like tree planting to “cover” the emissions from your everyday life. But tackling climate change means that emissions also have to drop directly—if everyone keeps driving gas-powered cars, for example, forests can’t solve the problem.

“If households and businesses know their carbon footprint but rely on offsets as a mechanism to ‘reduce’ emissions, there is a real missed opportunity to make high-impact changes,” says Zerofy cofounder Till Quack, a Zurich-based software engineer who previously worked at Apple and Meta. “Given that 70% of global emissions can be indirectly attributed to households, people have a lot of power to drive emissions reductions from their homes.”

[Image: Zerofy]

The app can connect to smart home devices and smart meters to track energy use, and it automatically calculates your transportation footprint by using motion to sense when you’re walking or in a car or on a train. Users also have the option to connect their credit card to the app, so if they make a purchase from a clothing store or an electronics company, it can estimate the potential emissions.

As it calculates emissions, Zerofy also gives a clear picture of which actions matter most. Some of that involves suggestions for new habits, like eating less meat. It also helps people choose new products like heat pumps or solar panels that can make a big difference in household emissions.

“We try to make everything with the least friction possible,” Quack says. “People can really get the first solar quotes from certain vendors with just a single click from the app, because we already have a profile of the household size.” For renters and others who can’t install their own solar panels, the startup offers the option to invest in a shared solar farm in Estonia.

The concept of a personal carbon footprint sometimes gets criticized as a distraction from larger changes that are necessary. (The fact that oil companies worked with an ad agency to roll out the phrase carbon footprint and launch the first carbon calculators doesn’t help.) But what individuals do collectively obviously does matter; people need to choose to buy heat pumps and use bikes or electric cars. Having a better understanding of our own footprint also helps people advocate for the best policy, Quack argues.

“If people learn about the impact of emissions and energy on a household level, they will be better equipped to understand system-wide changes and the impact of important policies,” he says. “For example, truly seeing in real time your emissions from driving your car or heating (significant), eating a burger (pretty significant), or streaming Netflix (pretty insignificant) gives users an understanding of the relative impact of certain measures and actions, which may seem very abstract at a system level.”

The app is available in Europe and will roll out in the U.S. this spring.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adele Peters is a senior writer at Fast Company who focuses on solutions to climate change and other global challenges, interviewing leaders from Al Gore and Bill Gates to emerging climate tech entrepreneurs like Mary Yap. She contributed to the bestselling book "Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century" and a new book from Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies called State of Housing Design 2023 More


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