In our everyday life we are increasingly exposed to carbon dioxide information for our everyday life. From the grams CO2 the burger we ordered produced to the tons our travel created. I am exploring the concept of carbon literacy, our knowledge to interpret, understand and relate carbon dioxide information. My hypothesis is that ICT applications can be used to to improve carbon literacy , and so to make better decisions to reduce our carbon footprint.

Together with Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud I participated in the 24h development camp Ecomo09 inLondon. The ideas was to spend 24 hours, from 6.pm to 6.pm developing an application from scratch, in this case with an environmental theme. After some brainstorming sessions we decided to focus on an application to improve transform carbon information between different units.

Hacking at 3.a.m

The result is carbon.to a web application that allows to:

• Transform carbon dioxide information to other units for example km of train.
• Compare different footprints for instance how many apples footprints equal a 4 hours flight
• Use as an API to transform CO2 information and present it in your own service in another unit. For instance: carbon.to/apples?co2=10 gives you back an XML with how many

Screenshot

We will keep in updating the service and we will also try to analyze the impact and what it needs to be improved. Have a look and play around with it!