Calculate Emissions by Using Our Simple Carbon Footprint Calculator - Tradewater

Calculate your Carbon Emissions

using our simple carbon footprint calculator

Whether it’s your daily commute, your flight to Hawaii, your love of steak dinners, or your grandmother’s 90th birthday party, many of our regular activities produce greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

If you’re looking to reduce emissions, understanding what you produce is a good place to start.

Once you calculate emissions using our carbon footprint calculator, you can create a plan to reduce your carbon footprint through sustainable lifestyle or business adjustments—then offset the rest.

Take Climate Action Today! Today!

Whether your household or business goal is carbon neutral or net zero, Tradewater’s carbon footprint calculator gives you the option to calculate and offset household emissions, offset travel emissions, offset events you may be planning, and offset business emissions. Offsetting with Tradewater means that you are purchasing high-quality, verified carbon offset credits that enable us to collect and destroy potent greenhouse gases all over the world.
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Populate your climate commitment budget (USD) or the total emissions (CO2e) you would like to offset here.

Calculate Your Carbon Footprint

Do you want to understand your carbon footprint?
Use the free carbon calculators below to determine your emissions.

Household

Calculate the everyday emissions associated with your lifestyle and household.

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Business

Calculate your business's carbon footprint and become a Carbon Neutral Business.

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Travel

Calculate the emissions from your business and personal trips or vacations.

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Event

Calculate the emissions from your events, like a wedding or conference.

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Tradewater works to permanently prevent the world’s most potent greenhouse and ozone-depleting gases from releasing into the atmosphere and provides high quality, verified carbon offsets.

More on everyday emissions

The average monthly carbon footprint of a U.S. household is 4 tons of CO2 (or CO2e) What you eat, how often you fly, the size of your family, how you get to and from places, and what type and how much electricity you use all impact your carbon footprint.

There are so many factors that go into a business carbon footprint, from the industry you’re in, the facilities you work in, the number of employees you have and where they work, your business activities and more. Beyond our calculator and offsetting options, we have solutions for businesses of all sizes to reduce their emissions and multiply their climate impact.

Traveling for work or play comes with a carbon footprint, with factors like air and car travel, lodging, and meals contributing to this footprint. Our travel calculator can help you measure and offset the emissions associated with your trip.

Regardless of type, events can have a significant carbon footprint. Travel, food, lodging, and other components impact this footprint. By calculating and understanding your event’s carbon footprint, you can take steps to make the event more sustainable and offset the remaining emissions.

Beyond our calculator and offsetting options, we have solutions for businesses of all sizes to reduce their emissions and multiply their climate impact.

Find out how you can make the greatest impact

To learn more about how to invest in high-quality carbon projects, download our free guide: High impact carbon projects: Maximizing your climate investment

Request your free user guide below!

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FAQ
Tradewater generates carbon offset credits by collecting and permanently destroying harmful greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the form of refrigerant gases through a safe, verifiable process. If not destroyed, these GHGs would eventually be released into the atmosphere.

Permanence

Emission reductions are considered permanent if they are not reversible. In some projects, such as forestry or soil preservation, carbon offset credits are issued based upon the volume of CO2 that will be sequestered over future decades—but human actions and natural processes such as forest fires, disease, and soil tillage can disrupt those projects. When that happens, the emission reductions claimed by the project are reversed.

The destruction of halocarbon does not carry this risk. All destruction activities in Tradewater’s projects are conducted pursuant to the Montreal Protocol , which requires “a destruction process” that “results in the permanent transformation, or decomposition of all or a significant portion of such substances.” Specifically, the destruction facilities Tradewater uses must meet or exceed the recommendations of the UN Technology & Economic Assessment Panel , which approves certain technologies to destroy halocarbons, including the requirement that the technology achieve a 99.99% or higher “destruction and removal efficiency.” Simply put, this means that Tradewater’s technologies ensure that over 99.99% of the chemicals are permanently destroyed. During the destruction process, a continuous emission monitoring system is used to ensure full destruction of the ODS collected.

Accuracy

Some carbon offset projects necessarily rely on estimations or assumptions when calculating the emission reductions from project activities. Forestry projects, where developers make assumptions about the carbon that will be sequestered over future decades if trees are conserved, are a perfect example. Such projects sometimes result in an overestimation of the environmental benefit of the project.

Tradewater’s halocarbon projects avoid the issue of overestimation by consistently conducting extremely precise testing and measurement of the amount of refrigerant destroyed in each project.

  • Every container of ODS that Tradewater destroys is weighed by a third-party using regularly calibrated scales. The ODS is then sampled by a third-party and analyzed by an accredited refrigerant laboratory to determine its species and purity. These two steps combine to ensure that credits are issued only for the precise volume and type of refrigerant destroyed.
  • The destruction facilities that Tradewater uses continuously monitor the incineration process during destruction events to ensure that over 99.99% of the ODS is destroyed. This monitoring is mandated by regulatory protocols and is part of the verification process to which projects are subjected.
  • Tradewater accounts for the project emissions created during the collection, transport, and destruction of ODS, and the number of offsets issued is reduced by a corresponding amount. The protocols that we use also build in other reductions to account for substitute chemicals that will be used to replace the destroyed refrigerants. Tradewater publishes this information in the documentation for all its ODS destruction projects. These documents outline how the material was obtained, the project emissions calculations, the test results, and the amount and type of ODS chemicals destroyed, among other information.

    • Additionality

    It is a basic requirement of all carbon offset projects that the underlying project activities are additional. “Additional” means that the projects would not happen in the absence of a carbon market. Tradewater’s halocarbon projects simply would not happen – and the gases would be left to escape into the atmosphere – without the sale of the resulting carbon offset credits. This is because there is no mandate to collect and destroy these gases. It is still permissible to buy, sell, and use halocarbons that were produced before the ban. There are other reasons halocarbon destruction projects are additional:

    • There are no incentives or financial mechanisms to encourage halocarbon destruction. According to the International Energy Agency and United Nations Environment Program, “there is rarely funding nor incentive” to recover and destroy ozone depleting substances in storage tanks and discarded equipment. And collecting, transporting, and destroying halocarbons is time-intensive and expensive. The burden to collect and destroy these gases therefore remains prohibitive outside of carbon offset markets—meaning that if organizations like Tradewater do not do this work, nobody else will.
    • Countries are not focused on the need to collect and destroy halocarbons. The Montreal Protocol has been celebrated as a success because of its production ban. This success, however, ignores the legacy gases produced before the ban and is a blind spot for government regulators. In the U.S., for example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) developed a Vintaging Model in the 1990s to estimate the quantify of ozone depleting substances left in circulation. Based on the inputs and assumptions put into the model, the EPA predicted that no CFCs would be available for recovery beyond 2020 in the United States. But this prediction did not prove accurate. Tradewater has collected and destroyed more than 1.5 million pounds of CFCs globally in recent years and continues to identify thousands of pounds per week.
    • International carbon accounting standards do not require corporations to measure or track emissions tied to halocarbons, and refrigerants are specifically excluded from Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) commitments. These commitments derive from emissions reporting under the GHG Protocol, which requires companies to report on emissions only from new generation refrigerants, such as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), but does not establish any obligation to report inventories or emissions of refrigerants still in use, such as CFCs and HCFCs. All these factors combine to make Tradewater’s carbon offset projects highly additional. As Giving Green, an initiative of IDinsight, concluded: “Tradewater would not exist without the offset market, so this element of additionality is clearly achieved.” The case for additionality is not so clear for some other project types, such as forestry and landfill gas carbon projects. For example, some forests are already being conserved for their beauty, or for use as parks, and generate carbon offset credits only because those conservation efforts do not yet have full formal protection in place to avoid deforestation in the future. Similarly, methane from landfills can be used to make electricity or captured as compressed natural gas, thereby creating additional revenue streams to support the activities, beyond the sale of carbon credits.