At eCO2 Greetings, we take carbon reduction seriously. That’s why we plant 10 trees with all Christmas ecards for business purchased. Every tree puts back 1 tonne of CO2 over its lifetime. That’s thousands of tonnes of CO2 offset on behalf of our customers.

However, recognising that education about the carbon impact of our lives is a big a part of becoming a more sustainable society, and education should be fun, we have produced Carbonize.

Carbonize is  the first app to compare the carbon impact of every-day, and not so everyday items and activities that we consume, use and see as part of the modern world around us. It allows you to pick from over 100 different items and activities and pitch one against another in terms of their carbon footprint, to see how they compare in terms of the carbon produced.

Did you know that you can sending an e card creates roughly 50 x less CO2 than sending a paper card? Well we would pick that one, wouldn’t we! But it does show how much more environmentally friendly our Christmas ecards for business are. Add the fact that we plant 10 trees for every ecard purchase and that is why we rightly proclaim our ecards as being the greenest on the planet.

How about the fact that the CO2 produced from Mount Etna every year is equivalent to 217 Space Shuttle flights, or a cheeseburger has the same carbon footprint as 37 bananas, or even that a heart bypass operation is equivalent in CO2 to 3,666 pints of beer! There are thousands of different comparisons you can make on Carbonize, and here’s the best bit – because we want as many people as possible to have a go on the app and improve, if ever so slightly, their awareness of carbon impact, we pledge to plant an additional tree for every 100 shares of a result or #carbonizefact. In the first week since launch, the app saw over 3,000 shares! So that’s an extra 30 trees planted for starters.

Putting together an educational piece like this is quite a task, so we took information from many sources including DEFRA, WWF, the Carbon Trust, BREEAM, The Stockholm Environmental Institute and the Guardian. However, by far the most quoted source was from the book ‘How bad are my bananas’ written by Mike Berners-Lee (you know, the one who has quite a famous brother who had something to do with the creation of the World Wide Web J).

So come on, if you haven’t had a go yet, visit the Carbonize app to have a go yourself and share the result, so the small thing you learn about carbon impact will go towards us planting more trees to offset it.

Just click here. Thank you.