Our mission
Who really knows what 1 kg, 100 kg, or a tonne of CO₂ actually represents? For most of us, these numbers stay abstract. That makes it hard to translate climate awareness into informed everyday decisions. Without a tangible reference point, we can't meaningfully weigh the climate impact of one purchase against another, at the supermarket or anywhere else.
The main goal of ClimateCart is not only to estimate the footprint of your groceries; it's to help you become fluent in what carbon footprints mean. Grocery scanning is the means, not the end.
The invisible budget
The 1.5°C scenario of the Paris Agreement translates into a personal carbon budget of roughly 2.5 tonnes CO₂ per person per year. The average resident of Belgium emits about 10.2 tonnes today through their own consumption, more than four times as much. Public services, about 3.2 tonnes per person, are left out of this figure on purpose: we want to show the impact of our own consumption, because that is the part we can change ourselves by adapting our consumption habits. Food accounts for about 20% of that footprint: that is the part ClimateCart looks at.
Food is about 20% of the carbon footprint
But these numbers are just as abstract as the ones on your receipt, and that's the whole problem. A budget expressed in tonnes tells you nothing if you have no feel for what a tonne of CO₂ actually is.
Think of it like a financial budget. We all know exactly what our monthly salary is, and what groceries, rent, and transport cost, so we manage carefully and try not to overspend. Our climate budget works the same way in principle: we have a certain amount we're allowed to spend. Yet we're constantly going over it, because we have no clear view of what we're spending in the first place. It's the equivalent of running up a credit card with no statement ever arriving. And we and our future generations are paying the price for that invisibility: the world is burning because no one sees the budget we're blowing through.
Making both sides of that equation tangible, what you're spending and what you're allowed: that is what ClimateCart is here for.
Why groceries
Groceries are an ideal subject for building this fluency. Almost everyone shops for food at least once a week, often more. That means the app puts a real carbon footprint number in front of you at a consistent, small, recurring interval, week after week, receipt after receipt. Over time, that repetition is what builds intuition. You start to develop a genuine feel for what 1, 10, or 100 kg of CO₂ actually looks like.
How to interpret the results
ClimateCart is designed to build your intuition about carbon footprints at the level of food categories and overall shopping patterns. That's where the numbers are meaningful.
What the results are good for:
- Getting a feel for the CO₂ weight of a typical weekly shop.
- Seeing which food groups (meat, dairy, produce, etc.) dominate your footprint.
- Comparing your own shopping over time and spotting trends.
- Exploring how a shift toward more plant-based choices would change the total.
- Situating your footprint against the Paris-compatible carbon budget.
What the results are not good for:
Comparing two specific products of the same type to find "the greener one", e.g. Brand A's cheddar versus Brand B's cheddar, or organic versus conventional tomatoes from different producers. That's not the goal of the app, and the underlying data doesn't support that use. Agribalyse provides representative average values per product category, not producer-specific measurements.
Read the numbers as category-level estimates, not as product-level scorecards. Used that way, they'll do exactly what the app is here for: turn abstract climate figures into something you actually recognize.