Carbon Hero Will Track Your Carbon Footprint

A new innovation to help calculate your carbon footprint from travel has just moved a step closer to being released to the market. Carbon Hero is a small handheld device, resembling a mobile phone, that uses ssatellite navigation technology to determine the carbon footprint created by the travel you do.

In 2006, Andreas Zachariah gave life to the idea of a small, compact device that could track carbon emissions released into the atmosphere by measuring both the distance travelled and the mode of transport used. That idea earned him a regional prize in the 2007 European Satellite Navigation Competition and last year, Carbon Hero was awarded the British Standards Institute prize for Sustainability Design in July.

Andreas Zachariah describes reasons for using Carbon Hero like this, “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,”

Zachariah and business partner in the project Nick Burch have filed a patent for the invention and plan to have Carbon Hero ready for beta-testing in a company in April 2008. With companies find it increasingly necessary to demonstrate their commitment to sustainability and the efforts they are making to reduce their carbon footprint, they will be able to use Carbon Hero to document the carbon emissions produced from business travel.

At this stage there has been no indication on a probable price of the Carbon Hero.

Much more detail can be found her at the Carbon Hero website.

The full press release can be found at Science Daily.