Sustainability on Max Halford

LCA software: exit the matrix

maxhalford25@gmail.com (Max Halford) — Sun, 09 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Measuring the environmental impact of a product is done using life cycle assessment (LCA). This is a methodology that breaks down a product’s life cycle into stages (LCI), and measures the impact of each stage on the environment (LCIA).

There are a few pieces of LCA software to choose from. The leading ones are SimaPro, GaBi, openLCA, and Umberto. These are all proprietary software, and they’re expensive. But there’s a free and open source alternative: Brightway.

Cutting up shoes to measure their footprint

maxhalford25@gmail.com (Max Halford) — Fri, 17 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Our mission at Carbonfact is to measure the environmental impact of clothes. This involves a lot of steps. The main one is to determine what materials a product is made of, along with each material’s mass. This is straightforward for most clothes like jumpers and pants. These are typically made of a single fabric, such as cotton or polyester. The mass of each material is roughly the same as the product’s mass.

Measuring the carbon footprint of pizzas

maxhalford25@gmail.com (Max Halford) — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Making environmentally friendly decisions can only be done with the right information. At Carbonfact, we’ve realized a big challenge is the lack of information about industrial processes. We tackle that slowly but surely by gathering data from various sources, and making it available to our customers.

Regarding food, the French government has a great initiative called Agribalyse. It’s a free database of environmental footprints for various food products. It includes raw ingredients straight out from the farm, as well as ready to eat dishes from the supermarket. It’s a great initiative, as it allows anyone to do their own research and make informed decisions.

Are Airbnb guests less energy efficient than their host?

maxhalford25@gmail.com (Max Halford) — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR

I compared the energy consumption of Airbnb guests versus their host, in the same apartment, during 2022. It appears that guests do in fact consume more energy than hosts. The data I used is available to any Airbnb host. I also open-sourced all the code I wrote for this analysis.

Introduction

European energy prices have soared in 2022. It’s gone to the point where some Airbnb hosts have become reluctant to rent, believing their guests are too wasteful and cost too much. You can see this by scrolling Airbnb groups on Facebook.

Quelle est l’empreinte écologique du Big Data? @ Toulouse Tech

maxhalford25@gmail.com (Max Halford) — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000