Boulder and Boulder County have partnered with Zerofootprint, a Toronto-based organization, that helps cities and individuals track, compare and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Zerofootprint’s ClimateSmart online carbon calculator and other tools can help you determine your own carbon footprint, and understand steps to reduce your score into the future. The tool permits groups and organizations to aggregate their efforts to participate in carbon reduction challenges, so business, schools and cities can compare their efforts to other groups.
You don’t have to be a Boulder resident to use Zerofootprint’s Personal Carbon Manager. They offer a range of tools for individuals and business, including a One Minute Calculator and Calculator Widget. There are also calculators and educational materials for children, youth and schools.
Commerical Retrofit Technology
Zerofootprint also sponsors the ZEROprize and the Re-Skinning Award to stimulate “market-disrupting” improvements in the design and development of retrofitting and re- skinning technologies (They use the term re-skinning as a shorthand for a holistic retrofit). These are the newly evolving technologies and building systems that improve the energy efficiency, sustainability, and livability of older buildings.
Energy management
Zerofootprint also developed a web-based software for large, multi-location organizations who must measure, manage, and report their environmental footprint. VELO facilitates data integration across operations while also automating the measurement, monitoring and modeling of an organization’s carbon emissions.
They have recently announced the TalkingPlug, a smart electrical outlet that contains energy measurement instruments, on-off relays, appliance identification tags, and wireless networking technology. The TalkingPlug outlet serves as a wireless communication node on a building energy network. These nodes continuously send appliance-specific energy consumption data to a local gateway for data collection and storage. Zerofootprint is currently working with utility companies, appliance manufacturers and technology resellers to bring the product to market.