Couchfish: Bring Me Your Carbon Couchfish

One of the many aspects travel gets flogged over are its carbon emissions. As I’ve written in the past, if you’d like to over-contribute in setting the planet on fire, getting on a plane works best. What about if you don’t? What about if you’d prefer to minimise your emissions? Skipping domestic flights is the obvious first step, but what next? With this in mind, over my recent three-week trip to Vietnam, I decided to track my carbon. Here’s what I found.
Before anything, I needed to decide what I should measure. Transport was a no-brainer, but what about food and accommodation? With flights removed, both can be significant contributors, but how significant? Well, it depends. How do you travel? What do you eat and drink? Where do you stay? It turns out no two travellers are the same.
Taking train-spotting to the next level. Photo: Stuart McDonald.
I needed a system that would track not only flights, but other transport, food and hotels. In the end I settled on two, one an app that I could use as I went, and the other a website I could populate at the end of my trip. There were pros and cons to each, and neither did everything I wanted to my satisfaction. That said, both show promise, and it will be interesting to see how they develop over time.
The two systems I tried out were the Capture app and the Path Net Zero calculator. While Capture has some usability issues, it is the more appropriate for travellers looking to measure their emissions as they go. If you’re a tour company wanting to figure out the emissions of a trip, Path Net Zero is by far the better option. I used Capture as I went, then at the end of it, inputted the data from Capture into Path Net Zero.
Capture would wake me each morning with an update on my environmental vandalism. Happy days.
There are some important differences between the two. Capture doesn’t include accommodation while Path Net Zero does. Each takes a different approach to food. In both you can calculate transport by distance or time, and as I used time for Capture, I used the same for Path Net Zero. Despite this, the results were often quite different.
As an example, Capture suggested 1,229.80kg for my two flights while Path Net Zero scored it at 824.52kg. This highlighted how tricky flying can be. How full was the flight, what class was flown (Path Net Zero allowed me to nominate class, Capture doesn’t). What type of plane was it? How was the weather? These can all impact the amount of emissions allocated. That said, in the scheme of things, does it matter? Probably not—flying is the wrecking ball. Using Capture’s numbers, the two flights accounted for a whopping 74% of my total emissions.
Tuk tuk versus Airbus at a glance with Path Net Zero.
Ok, so we all know flights suck for the planet, but what about if we removed flights? Then it got more interesting. With flights removed, train travel jumped to first place, at 43%, then food (26%), motorbike (15%) and car (12%). What about accommodation you ask? A mere 5%. Why? I stay in small hotels and homestays.
If you thought flights were hard, measuring accommodation was a veritable snake pit. For most hotels, electricity is the main emissions source—air-con, kitchens, laundry, pools, hot water, all need power. The more rooms, the more pools, the more restaurants, the more power. Despite what five-star resorts might proclaim, more often than not they are abject wrecking balls environmentally. They’re also some of the worst greenwashing scoundrels on the planet.
With an environmental vandalism pie-chart, air-travel wins.
I stayed at six places during my trip, all but one with twelve rooms or less, and only one had a pool. When it came to figuring out hotel emissions, rather than ask the check-in desk for their meter readings, I turned to the books.
The most useful was Carbon Footprint Assessment of Home-Stays in Thailand by Koiwanit and Filimonau. It looked at homestays in Ranong province, using actual data, and threw out