Track your carbon footprint with ALF
Every check-in we make on foursquare is like leaving a little track of all the places we’ve been. Those tracks can be put to all sorts of interesting uses that Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai never could have imagined when they conceived the service in 2008. One such use is using those check-ins to track our carbon footprint and educate us on our impact to the environment.
That’s the purpose of a new app from AMEE called the AMEE Location Footprinter (ALF for short). It calculates the distance between your foursquare checkins and then makes an educated guess on what form of transport you used between the two destinations, which enables it to figure out exactly how big your carbon footprint was for that leg of your journey.
Each week, ALF sends you an email with your total carbon footprint for the week. It makes an easy way to see just how much impact you had on the environment and how tiny changes in your habits can influence your impact in major ways.
AMEE is a software as a service provider that helps major companies calculate the impact their decisions have on the environment.
ALF does make a few assumptions about your mode of travel that may or may not be accurate (sadly, walking between venues often isn’t an option here in suburbia), so it shouldn’t be used as a definitive account of your carbon footprint, but it is a fun way to see what kind of an impact you’re making on the environment.
What do you think of ALF? Do you think its numbers are accurate?
