About
The Three CCCs Tracker took shape over a decade its author spent delivering environmental direct support to businesses in SW England (and a decade before that helping to start and run a skunk-works Green Team inside a multinational…)
The ‘Baseline Review’ component is an interactive version of one evolved in the SW in the early noughties.
The ‘Tracker’ mechanism evolved whilst gathering data from a hundred-plus business members of Resource Efficiency networks from 2006–8 who each had to report the cost and consumption savings they were achieving. In pulling together a number of separate spreadsheets, a single ‘Tracker’ of cost and consumption emerged - the Two CCs Tracker (downloadable free…).
Adding the third C was a blindingly obvious step. The breakthrough realization was that ALL the necessary data was already commonly available - the Two CCs Tracker already collates information distributed within any organization. The Three CCCs Tracker adds standard energy and carbon conversion factors… which are published by the UK Government for exactly this sort of purpose.
Integrating this into a single system allows a complete carbon profile to be constructed out of its components. Each component is calculated separately, using standard, published algorithms or methods. Mostly standard – the ‘Waste’ and ‘Purchasing’ elements depend on some only-just-emerging research, and some innovation (defined in a primitive “carbon calculus”, laid out within the Tracker).
Integrating this conceptually required some thought. Excel remains an ideal vehicle for general use - it’ll run on anything, and everyone is familiar with the computing model.
But the Three CCCs Tracker is far too complex for a standard Excel interface to be workable. So the map-bar interface was designed, animated so as to provide a pervasive, clickable visual record of where you are in the process at all times - a way to navigate, so you can’t get lost.