Do You Know Your Carbon Footprint?
Have you ever thought about your impact on this planet? We mean this quite literally, do you have any idea about your carbon footprint? You are probably thinking how on earth can I know this and where would I even start to calculate it? Fortunately, some businesses are working hard to make it easier for us to consume responsibly.
Giki is a mobile app that informs users about the UK supermarket products they buy and the companies they buy from, by awarding badges to products based on sustainability, health and fairness. Giki’s aim is to drive sustainable consumption by connecting consumer values with their shopping decisions, allowing them to scan products’ barcodes through the app and see which badges have been awarded by the social enterprise. Giki encourage full transparency and sustainable consumption by drawing on a number of different data sources such as product information, government guidelines and scientific research.
The Social Enterprise is committed to making it easy to find sustainable, healthy and ethical products. Giki just released their updated Low Carbon Footprint badge, now available on the Giki app. The Low Carbon Footprint badge is one of the smartphone app’s 13 badges and sorts product categories into low, medium, high and very high carbon footprints. The latest update of the badge marks Giki’s support of London Climate Action Week (1-8 July 2019), making it easy for consumers to find products which are fully aligned with a 1.5 degree lifestyle for food and drink, and are also often healthier options.
“At Giki we want to make it easier to live a more sustainable lifestyle” says Jo Hand, co-founder of Giki. “Carbon emissions are a crucial part of our environmental impact, and food and drink make up a quarter of our personal carbon footprint. For the first time, you can now easily check the carbon impact of a UK supermarket product using our app and our low carbon footprint badge.”
London Climate Action Week is an initiative by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, following his declaration of a climate emergency. The first ever London Climate Action Week will take place between 1-8 July 2019, bringing together London's climate expertise and talent from across sectors to run events, and focus on scaling up practical solutions and identifying new opportunities to help cut carbon emissions to keep global temperature increases within 1.5 degrees and support the Paris Agreement.
Giki offers a practical solution for consumers to reduce their carbon footprint daily, in line with the goals of London Climate Action Week. “London Climate Action Week is helping to build the momentum around a 1.5 degree lifestyle” says Jo Hand. “This is a crucial step, if we are to live up to UK commitments of zero carbon by 2050. At Giki we provide ratings on UK supermarket products which enable us all to identify products with a lower environmental impact. The low carbon footprint badge indicates products aligned with living a 1.5 degree lifestyle.”
The Giki mobile app offers a simple way to find alternatives to high carbon footprint meals, based on major academic and scientific carbon footprint studies from around the world and drawing on 280,000 UK supermarket products in the Giki database. “Just over one third of UK supermarket products have a low carbon footprint” says Jo Hand. “Consuming these products would enable you to live a 1.5 degree lifestyle in terms of diet. We compared two meals: Steak, chips and salad, followed by cheese and biscuits, as Meal 1, and vegetable risotto followed by fruit salad as Meal 2. Meal 1 has a carbon footprint five times larger than Meal 2, largely due to beef, and the agricultural land required to produce Meal 1 is 7 times greater than Meal 2.”
We couldn't be prouder to be working with Giki!
For more details on Giki and the Low Carbon Footprint badge, visit Giki’s website https://gikibadges.com/ For more information on London Climate Action Week, visit the Mayor of London’s website.