We just completed our 6 month journey in our van. And personally, I am usually quite vocal about sustainability and the footprints we all have on the world. For instance, I am advocate against flying often. Now considering we just finished driving a lot of kilometers in a ~3'000 kg diesel-fueled van, I ought to be accused of some hypocrisy: how can I chastise people around me for flying multiple times a year when surely I just dumped an insane amount of pollutants into the world? And frankly, I don't know what to say to that. So let's start by doing the math.
Our driving emissions
We have driven a total of 16'260 km in the last half-year. First of all I am curious how much the average Dutch person drive in a year, because mind you, we don't and haven't owned a regular car in our 5 year working life, which might compensate a little. The answer is the average consumer car (in 2023) drives about 11'200 km. Our single trip accounts for 45% above average driving, which is not great but also not disastrous.
How much CO2 did we dump in that time? Our car is a EURO5 class of diesel, with a 131 HP 2198cc engine. Registered on the license plate is an emission of 199 g/km of CO2. That brings a total of 3.24 metric tons of CO2.
The alternative calculation: we drive an average of 8.6 L per 100 km, so 1'398 L diesel total (gulp). At 2'606 g of CO2 per liter diesel that's 3.64 tons of CO2. Slightly more, but it confirms the ballpark number. We'll continue with the more pessimistic number.
How much is that?
These numbers are a little abstract without knowing what a single person emits in a year. I found getting an exact number a little tricky, but we can consider the order of magnitude.
milieucentraal.nl, "Wat is je CO2-voetafdruk?": They mention 17 tons of CO2 per household. At an average of 2.1 people per household this would be 8.1 tons of CO2 per person on average.
Our World In data, "Per capita consumption-based CO₂ emissionsGlobal Carbon Project": Here 8.8 tons of CO2 is mentioned per capita in the Netherlands.
All-in-all about 8 tons of CO2 per Dutch person seems like an optimistic assumption then.
Our diesel CO2 emission is 1.82 tons of CO2 per person, as there are two of us. Over an 8 ton total this amounts to about 23% of the yearly CO2 'budget' of each of us. This has shocked me a bit, it is a larger contribution than I had thought.
What if we went flying?
Another thought I had. When it comes to traveling I think about flying / not flying often. With those 1.82 tons of CO2 for each of us, how far could we have flown? An economy class return flight from Amsterdam to Montreal (Canada) would account for 1.9 tons. Staying within the bounds of our trip, a return flight to Ioannina (central Greece) would have been 0.77 tons per person.
myclimate.org, "CO₂ Flight Calculator"
There are a bunch of online calculators, unfortunately they are not very transparent, but at least they all give similar answers.
Other impacts
Gas & Electricity
The diesel we burned isn't the only factor. We also used water, gas and electricity much differently. In 2024 from mid April to mid October we used 84 m3 of gas in our house. This summer we emptied about 5 medium gas canisters instead, using about 13 kg of LPG, or 26 liters (1 kg of liquid propane expands to about 2 L), or 0.026 m3. So we avoided using 84 m3 gas, not a big safe as we use much more gas in winter for heating. At 1.8kg of CO2 per m3 of gas we saved emitting 150 kg of CO2 through gas usage. Not really significant, especially considering that we still had hot showers at campsites when we could, which I'm not counting here.
In a similar vain, we used 842 kWh of electricity in this period in our house last year. This summer we used basically nothing, as the vast majority of the used electricity came from our solar panels. In the Netherlands we cause about 0.22 kg of CO2 per kWh of electricity, so in the last months we saved about 185 kg of CO2 through less electricity usage.
Wikipedia, "Aardgas" CBS, "Rendementen en CO2-emissie van elektriciteitsproductie in Nederland, update 2023"
This adds up to 335 kg of CO2 saved by not needing utilities. Nice, but only one-tenth of the additional diesel emissions.
Water
It doesn't add to the CO2 equation, but is relevant anyway: I suspect we used way less water than we would otherwise. While traveling we had two 19L jerrycans that we filled. Each would last about a day and a half. That would be 2.2 m3 total in the trip. For comparison, in our house in 6 months we used 24 m3. So that's a pretty good save, although again this doesn't account for our campsite showers.
Accommodation
Another thing. What if we had spent our nights in hostels / hotels instead? I'm assuming our nights in the van were basically devoid of emissions, as we didn't (and couldn't) wash sheets every day. Numbers will be hard to find, but this report charged by Hostelworld makes some claims. It would have been between 130 kg and 750 kg of CO2 for 6 months in hostels or hostels (respectively).
bureauveritas.co.uk, "Hostels now 82% less carbon intense than hotels"
Ton of CO2 emitted per year, per bed for a hotel: ~1.4, for a hostel: 0.25.
Conclusion
We choose to make a special, once-in-a-lifetime trip. And this trip did have a significant negative impact on the world. Though adding everything together, I don't think our journey did worse than trips people make on average, especially considering how much we got to see and experience. Regardless, we'll try to keep doing well in the future!