As a follow up to my previous post, I downloaded and tried out a bunch of carbon footprint apps available in iPhone’s Apple Store. Here are my extremely formal and well thought out comments.
-Carbon – estimates your footprint based on a few basic criteria and is static. Is worse in many ways than some of the basic online calculators like the one produced by the EPA
-CO2Calculator – useful, but really just for plane flights
-Carbon Trim – you can search for generic products like a four-door car, beer, or canned carrots. However, it doesn’t provide any product- or brand-specific information. For example, you can’t search for a Samsung TV or Northface jacket
-Carbon Choice – looks like it was made by a toddler and doesn’t work well
-Greenfoot – is a static calculator, but uses more inputs and provides concrete suggestions for reducing your household footprint
-CarbonFootprint – Describes how to get offsets and what contributes to your footprint, but is really more like an encyclopedia on the topic than a calculator
-OffCents – This is the best of the bunch. It’s very narrow–focused solely on road transport–but it uses GPS to figure out how far you’ve traveled, estimates the carbon generated, tells you how much it’d cost to offset, then even let’s you enter a payment option to automatically buy an offset for each trip