The Best Eco-Apps to reduce your Carbon Footprint
Ecosia
Ecosia is a search engine with an ecological aspiration. The ad revenues that are generated through increased search requests are used to plant trees worldwide. That way you can contribute in an effective way to fight climate change as trees can absorb carbon as we all know.
Happy Cow
With the app Happy cow you can discover all vegan and vegetarian food options near you. Especially while travelling or exploring a new city this app comes in very handy. Switching to a vegetarian or even vegan diet (at least every once in a while) can help to reduce your carbon footprint immensly. The livestock sector namely produces a greater carbon output than all cars, trucks and automobiles combined according to Greenpeace.
Too good to go
Foodwaste is a major problem because it is a disposal of valuable ressources. Too good to go is an app that helps you fight foodwaste. The apps allows you to chose a location and then provides you with a list of all participating restaurants near you. You can then see which restaurants have food leftovers that can be picked up. For a cheap price you can then fetch a surprise food box you previously bought via the app. There is a given time frame within which you need to pick up your box and normally speaking it's around the closing hour of the restaurant thus rather late. Still, it's a great and cheap way to do something good and with every meal retrieved 2kg of C02 are saved!
Charity Miles
Charity Miles tracks your movement when running, dancing or simply walking. If you have an Iphone it simply connects to your data from the health app. With every mile that you've moved, money will be donated to a previously selected charity of your choice. Participating charities include WWF, Pencils for promise, save the children and many more. The money comes from corporate sponsors which redirect part of their advertising budget towards sponsoring the charity donations. It's a great way to motivate yourself to excercise more while doing good. The app even allows you to build a team and collect money with your friends while on the move. Lots of fun is guaranteed.
Forest
Forest helps you to stay focused on your tasks at hand. The principle is the following: With the app you can time downtime of your phone. If you manage to abide by it (the app notices when you close it to do something else) you get rewarded with a virtual tree in your virtual forest. The more offtime you plan, the more virtual trees you collect. Once you have collected enough virtual trees you can transform your savings to finance the planting of an actual tree somwhere. That way you basically do two good things at once: Reducing your electricity consumption (thus saving energy) and reducing carbon emission (by planting trees).
Good on you
The Good on you app, which even Emma Watson promotes, makes ethical shopping easier for everyone. As it can be quite overwhelming to differentiate the legitimate ethical brands from empty promises, the app ranks brands on how ethical they really are. That way you can see at one glance whom to trust and where you should invest your money.
Tomorrow
Tomorrow claims to be the "bank of tomorrow". With the app you can set up a checkings account with a few simple steps. The difference to commercial banks is that Tomorrow invests the money into sustainable projects such as renewable energy, microcredits or organic farming. What a lot of people namely don't know is that the money you have deposited at your bank is invested mostly in the oil industry, arms industry or in other companies with questionable practices. Transforming to a truly sustainable lifestyle therefore extends to your bank account. Currently the app is only available in Germany but let's hope that expansion plans follow soon!
Depop
Depop is a marketplace where anyone can buy and sell things that are no longer wanted. By giving things like clothes for example a second life you can do something good for the environment (and your budget). Research shows that by preventing one kilogramm of clothing from ending up in a landfill, you can save as much as 3.6kgs of CO2 emissions (Source). On average we wear our clothes only four times before disposing of them. Furthermore, there is an immense amount of ressources that go into producing only one single T-Shirt: This should motivate us to buy secondhand more frequently and Depop makes that easy for us by providing us with a platform.
