While most greenhouse gas Calculate Your Footprint pages only ask for your home size or miles driven, our spreadsheet also factors in how energy efficient your home or car (or transportation) is. Through our spreadsheet you can determine your actual impact, including your energy-efficient changes in your home, transportation, diet or garden, and you can recalculate to an accurate degree. Save your results to contrast your efficiency in future years.
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Access the Calculate Your Footprint Spreadsheet
This Calculate Your Footprint excel spreadsheet is programmed to help you calculate your impact related to electricity, heating, diet, travel (e.g., air travel), and automobile. You may also deduct any credits you have, such as trees or clean energy. Our diet calculator lets you make changes in your diet to learn their effects. Also, the tool works mainly with U.S. miles and gallons, but also converts from or works with liters and kilometers. Final results are shown in metric tons and kilograms on the Totals page. Also a personalized graph shows how each area measures against others. Here is the excel spreadsheet to work with:
What you need to collect in advance to calculate your footprint
Calculating Transportation Gas (or Diesel) Use: For a car, the easiest way to estimate miles per year is to observe your current vehicle mileage, then divide that by the number of years owned. We provide a link to help estimate your vehicle’s miles per gallon.
Calculating Electricity and Home Gas (or Fuel) Use: Log into your energy provider’s website(s) to get Electricity use and Natural Gas (or other source fuel) annual usage. You should be able to see your annual use, by month. There is often a way to download an Excel spreadsheet to obtain each month’s usage, and total them to obtain your annual usage.
Compare your footprint to average U.S. home and person
How do you compare? The graph above shows results for an average U.S. home, assuming 1 person with 1 average car. The average American house uses approximately 4 metric tons greenhouse gases for electricity, 3 tons for natural gas (mostly heating), about 4.6 tons per household car, and 5 tons for diet (very conservatively estimated) per U.S. resident. This assumes no airline travel. For actual energy numbers in your state, see Compare Your Electricity Use and Compare Your Energy Use.
To find ways to lower your greenhouse gases, go to the main page: Green Living Quantified.