Ecology calculators

Everyday environmental questions usually come down to a simple arithmetic: an activity you can measure, multiplied by an impact factor you choose. The Ecology calculators are built around that pattern. The Flight Emissions Calculator turns passenger distance into a CO₂ scenario, the Food Miles Calculator turns shipment mass and distance into transport-only emissions, the E-waste Impact Calculator multiplies device counts by lifecycle and recyclable-mass factors, and the Composting Impact Calculator estimates avoided emissions and compost yield from food-waste mass. Together they cover the two sides of everyday impact: the emissions side (transport, energy, food) and the waste-and-resources side (composting, e-waste, water).

Choosing between them starts with what you can actually measure. Have a flight’s distance and route type? Use the flight calculator. Know what a shipment weighs and how far it travels? The food-miles tool estimates one transport leg at a time, so run it once per mode rather than blending a whole journey into one factor. Have a pile of devices or food scraps? The e-waste and composting tools both take a count or mass and apply factors you supply. The calculators are deliberately honest about where the numbers come from: every empirical factor is an input you provide, recorded with its source, version, geography, and year.

To compare options fairly, keep the boundaries the same across runs. The food-miles result covers transport only — production, packaging, refrigeration, and retail are excluded — so it cannot be stacked against a full lifecycle estimate without noting the difference. Vary one factor at a time and treat the resulting span as a sensitivity range, not a confidence interval. Comparing a 1,000 km flight against a 500 kg freight shipment only makes sense if both runs use compatible CO₂e definitions and the same system boundary.

These tools are for comparison and learning, not certification. None of the results is an inventory, an offset quantity, or a compliance figure, and a precise-looking number does not make the underlying factor precise. Use them to see which of your scenarios is larger, where the biggest levers are, and how much the answer depends on the factor choice — then confirm any factor against its original dataset before acting on it.