Everyone knows they can reduce their carbon footprint by using public transport and carsharing. If you want to take things a step further, it’s really easy to make your journey carbon neutral.

Carbon offsetting is cheap enough that for most journeys in the UK it’ll be under a tenner, less if you split it with your passengers, so you could even round it up and make your journey carbon negative. This article looks at two websites where you can offset your travel.

Energy Revolution

Loads of festivals work directly with Energy Revolution to help offset the impact of their events. As an industry collaboration, 100 per cent of donations go to sustainability projects.

All the money raised from last summer’s festival travel went to Solar for Schools, a project that installs solar panels at schools across the UK, producing clean electricity and helping schools educate children about the importance of a low-carbon future.

They have a festival travel carbon calculator which can work out the impact of driving or getting public transport. It’s preprogrammed with loads of events, but for any missing, you can type in a destination postcode yourself. They’ve already turned nearly 8.5 million miles of festival travel into renewable energy.

A return car journey all the way from Edinburgh to Boomtown (nearly 700 miles!) is only £10.09 to offset with Energy Revolution, and myclimate is even cheaper. While some festivals, like Boomtown, already include a set carbon offset amount in each car parking pass, it’s only gonna cost you a few quid to neutralise your actual emissions.

If you’re already using public transport, you might have very little to offset unless you’re doing a massive journey. That same Edinburgh to Boomtown route is £2.47 to offset by train, and just £1.56 by coach. If that was from London or Bristol, it’s about 25p return.

myclimate

We use myclimate for offsetting TheFestivals. They have really simple calculators including for flights, car journeys and people.

If you already know the exact amount of carbon you want to offset you can just enter that into myclimate and avoid their calculators entirely.

How to offset a car journey with myclimate

Offsetting your carbon footprint is good, but it’s better to put out less emissions in the first place. Unless you can walk or cycle, the best way to do that is getting a coach direct to the festival. A car journey won’t be too much worse but only if you share with 3 or 4 passengers.

Head over to myclimate’s car journey calculator to enter the total distance of the journey to your next festival (or anywhere else!).

Use Google Maps or similar to work out the distance from home to the festival, then double it for the round trip distance. Unfortunately, you’ll need to convert it from miles to km to enter into myclimate, but you can do this in two seconds here.

myclimate will ask if your car is petrol or diesel, then ask you the size of the vehicle. If your car tells you your actual fuel consumption, you can make things more accurate by entering it directly. If you need to convert from miles per gallon to litres per 100km, use this. It’s a European project so it’s all metric.

The website will work out the carbon equivalent of your journey’s emissions and show you how this weighs up against an individual’s target and average.

You’ll then be shown the prices to offset your journey. The cheapest option sends money into climate protection projects in developing countries, which not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions but contribute to the social, ecological and economic development of the area.

If you prefer, myclimate will let you pay a slightly higher rate to choose exactly where you want your money to go.

Once you’ve paid, you’ll be emailed a carbon offset certificate with all the details of your contribution to climate protection.

Image credit: solar panel – myclimate