How we calculate Equivalent Kilometers.

KgCO2e Of Product * KgCO2e Per Km = Equivalent Km

We use Equivalent Kilometers of driving to help make it easier to understand the impact of individual products. If you imagine the emissions of a loaf of bread for example, we could describe this in Kilograms of CO2, but this can be hard to visualize for the average person. What does a kg of CO2 actually look like? Instead, we describe the amount of driving emissions it would be equal to. So then you can easily compare to something you are likely already familiar with, the emissions from driving a car.

The Car That We Use

To do this calculation, we use the emissions data on the Toyota Corolla Sedan Petrol (2020), so the kilometers we reference are the amount of kilometers you could drive in this car to equal the emissions from the product in question.

The specific data on this car is provided by the EPA, and is for the model: 2020 Toyota Corolla 2.0 L, 4 cyl, Automatic (AV-S10), Regular Gasoline.
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=41213

The data for this car shows a CO2e Per Mile of 317grams, this is then converted to Kg Per Kilometer by dividing 317 by 1000 to get Kilograms from Grams, and then multiplying this result by 0.621371 to convert from Miles to Kilometers. This provides a final number of 0.196974607 kgCO2e per km, which we then multiply by the Kilogram CO2e of a product to get the final number.

KgCO2e Of Product * 0.196974607 = Equivalent Km

Why This Car

The car model (Toyota Corolla) was chosen because of its worldwide popularity and recognizability. It has been called the most popular car in the world, and is therefore a good starting point to measure from. There are cars with both less and more emissions than this car, and we have provided data for many cars in our cars category.