THE average UK household produces around 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. If you’re feeling guilty about the impact you’re having on the planet, you might want to offset the damage by doing something positive, like planting a tree.

There are more than a dozen UK companies offering to help you offset your emissions in this way and others, but a Which? Money investigation has found major differences in the services they offer and the prices they charge.

HOW OFFSETTING SHOULD WORK

More than 90 per cent of Which? members have heard of carbon offsetting, according to a new survey, but only seven per cent have tried it. Of those who haven’t yet tried carbon offsetting, 68 per cent would consider doing so in the future.

Carbon dioxide is produced when fossil fuels (oil, natural gas and coal) are burnt. Many of our daily activities, such as driving, heating the home or watching television, cause the gas to be created – UK carbon dioxide emissions total over 500million tonnes a year.

By cutting back on these activities and using more renewable energy, we can shrink our carbon dioxide output, known as our ‘carbon footprint’.

Offsetting schemes claim to combat global warming by dealing with the emissions that cannot be prevented.

You give them money and this is invested in projects that either remove an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or prevent that carbon dioxide from being created.

OUR FINDINGS

We examined the websites of 13 UK-based carbon offset companies and have a number con  cerns about what we found.

• Several websites failed, in our view, to give enough information about where the money they receive goes.
• Most failed to reveal how much of your donation goes towards administration fees and company profits.
• We also found significant variations in how the sites calculated the amount of carbon dioxide our testers were emitting – even though we fed the same data into each of the websites.
• There were huge price differe  nces between the sites, with one wanting to charge us around £25 and another almost £160 to offset carbon produced by the same activities. The companies that we felt gave the most relevant and easily accessible information in our test were Climate Care, Blue Ventures Carbon Offset, Pure and the World Land Trust.

Climate Care, in particular, gives extensive details of its activities in its annual report, including the proportion of your donation that reaches the offset project it is supporting.

At the other end of the scale, the Flying Forest site was far too vague in our view, telling visitors to its site that ‘For every £10, Flying Forest will be able to plant a number of trees.’

We could find no information on The Offset Carbon Company’s website about independent verification of its projects.

And, unfortunately, as was the case with most of these companies, it didn’t give details of how much of your donation goes to each project.

If you decide to offset your carbon emissions, we think it is essential that you choose a company that offers verifiable projects, a clear audit trail and details of where your money goes.

HOW MUCH?

The price charged to offset a tonne of carbon dioxide varies hugely from one site to another. Carbon Offsets’ cheapest scheme costs £7 a tonne, compared with £22.64 a tonne for Carbon Responsible’s most expensive project. The cheapest product isn’t necessarily the best, though, as different firms support different schemes.

To make matters even more confusing, each online calculator uses a different method to work out your emissions. For instance, when we calculated the annual emissions for a house in west London (see right), the calculated emissions ranged from 1.15 tonnes with Carbon Footprint to 7.1 tonnes with The Carbon Neutral Company – more than six times as much.

If you find this as confusing as we did, you might prefer to use the government calculator  Visit www.direct.gov.uk/actonCO2   to try it out. This gave a household emissions figure of 4.31tonnes for our test home (see below).

The World Wildlife Fund also offers a user-friendly calculator at www.footprint.wwf.org.uk .

CHECKLIST

• Concentrate on reducing your family’s carbon emissions before you consider offsetting.
• If you want to offset, choose a company that publishes full details of its activities, including how much of your payment goes to each project. The most transparent in our research was Climate Care.
• The projects you are supporting should be verifiable, with clear details on the website of the work going on and transparent pricing. If this information isn’t available, go elsewhere or ask for more details.
• ‘Green’ car insurance deals that offset your car’s emissions can be expensive. It may work out cheaper if you choose a Best Buy and offset your own emissions with a firm that did well in our test.
• When buying new appliances, check their energy efficiency and go for A-rated items.
• When you replace other household items, look for good-value, low-energy options. The cost of low-energy light bulbs, for example, has fallen dramatically in recent years.

Is 'offset' care insurance value for money if compared with the Best Buys? Find out here .

Does your carbon footprint matter? Once family find out the truth. Read their opinion here.

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