Tracking your carbon footprint

With Carbon Hero, to see the effect a journey is having on the environment you just need to look at your mobile phone. “The feedback loop is almost immediate,” says Zachariah.

It is also educational in that by giving an idea of the environmental impact of different types of transport - whether by train, plane, bike or by foot - it allows users to easily compare one kind of travel with another and calculate the environmental benefits daily, weekly and monthly.

“If you go on a diet you want to see if all that effort has made a difference so you weigh yourself. The beauty of our system is that it’s easy; you have a ’weighing scale’ on you all the time giving you your carbon footprint. When you make the effort to walk instead of taking the car you can immediately see the result, so it feels more worthwhile doing it and you are more likely to stick with it,” says Zachariah.

To be tested in industry

Zachariah and Burch have filed a patent for their invention and they plan to have Carbon Hero ready for beta-testing in a company by the beginning of the next UK financial year in April 2008. It will then be used to track a team, a department or the whole company throughout the financial year.

“We are now in a closed beta-testing phase verifying that all works well, fixing problems and improving the application. It is a live and kicking application working on mobile cellular phones; it has already been tested on the Nokia platform now we are moving to Blackberry,” says Burch.

Sustainability is an important issue for governments, consumers, businesses and employees. Companies now want to show the efforts they are taking to reduce their carbon footprint.

“Green credentials don't just attract customers; they also attract employees who may have gone elsewhere," says Zachariah. “Companies that use Carbon Hero could present the results in their annual report, together with other ways in which they are helping the environment. It is easy to document carbon emissions from heating and electricity; now with Carbon Hero, companies can also document CO2 emissions from business travel. I'm also immensely proud that the EU has shown leadership with its '20% by 2020' carbon reduction goal”.

In addition to winning a regional prize in the 2007 European Satellite Navigation Competition, Carbon Hero was awarded the British Standards Institute (BSI) prize for Sustainability Design in July last year. It was a finalist in the 2007 Oxygen Awards and Deutsche Bank Pyramid Awards, and also invited to enter the Saatchi & Saatchi World-Changing Ideas Awards. It is now in the closing rounds of the 2008 St. Andrews Environmental Prize.