How to Track the Carbon Footprint of All Your Flights
In recent years, many of us have begun to pay more attention to our carbon footprints, and one of the individual activities that can have the greatest impact on this indicator is air travel.
This week TripIt is introducing a tool to help you not only understand what impact your vacation can have on the environment, but what you can do to offset that impact a little.
The travel app will aggregate your estimated flight emissions and then provide you with an overview of your total flight footprint. You can view the emissions per flight and also see the cumulative total for all trips over the year. Offers to compensate for these flights are as simple as recycling and as complex as planting a few trees.
Emissions are calculated using the Greenhouse Gas Protocol , which is the same methodology used by US and European agencies. Your personal emissions take into account the shame you have traveled to, as well as your class of service and environmental elements.
This feature is available to both free TripIt users and TripIt Pro subscribers.
To find out your emissions for a single flight, go to your detailed flight screen in the app. From there, you will see a Carbon Footprint section at the bottom of the page. Click on this to open a detailed overview of your emissions for that particular flight.
If you want to see all the travel statistics for a year, you can find carbon footprint information in the travel statistics under the More tab.
TripIt isn’t the only travel company to announce emission offsetting this week. Hotel and flight booking site Hopper announced on Tuesday that it will donate funds to plant four trees for every flight sold on its platform and two trees for every hotel room sold to offset some of the carbon footprint of those bookings.