One of the priorities chosen by the Boxborough 2030 Master Plan establishes strategies for energy conservation, carbon footprint reduction and climate change resiliency.

Curious about your carbon footprint?

One of the most trustworthy and used calculators around is the so-called Berkeley Calculator created by CoolClimate. Households and businesses can enter their consumption of electricity, oil, food, travel and so on. The calculator shows you how many tons of CO2 that represents, and how you stack up against similar households or businesses. At the end you can pledge to do certain actions and the calculator will show you what that would mean for your footprint. 

You will see that the calculator is not limited to emissions from energy use and reliance on fossil fuels.  The calculator can also show you that your purchases of goods and services also cause substantial additional carbon emissions — including emissions at the locations where goods are manufactured and packaged, and food grown. Calculating your current emissions with the Berkeley Calculator will give you important information about your impact and help you do your part in realizing Boxborough 2030 vision.

We’ve used quite a few of the Berkeley calculator’s principles and estimates in our own carbon calculator. Where is our calculator? When you sign up with Energize Boxborough, you will find the calculator in your profile. As you add Actions to your To-do list and complete Actions by marking them Done, our calculator will show you the impact of your activities.

Estimating your current level of carbon emissions is a huge motivator to take the various Actions listed on this website. To help you prioritize the Actions that yield the greatest reductions, the Energize Boxborough website indicates, for many of the Actions, the degree of emissions reduction the Action can achieve on average. These emission reductions can be compared with your current emissions to see how much progress you can make.