How do we calculate your impact?
At JouleBug, we believe that every sustainable action has a real-world impact. While the impact of each individual action may seem small, when done consistently and combined with others in your organization doing the same, the impact adds up.
Calculating Impact
Each action’s impact differs depending on where you live and your particular circumstances (home size, commute length, etc). Our team has researched these actions and established an estimated typical impact for each action based on United States Environmental Protection Agency data. Every individual user’s specific impact will vary from the typical impact, but with the high number of users, it averages out.
All the calculations, documentation, and resources used to calculate the impact can be viewed here. This includes information on how we calculate the impact of different actions and the sources we use for our data.
Understanding Action Categories
Actions are categorized in one of three labels, which affects how their impact is calculated over time.
Investment Actions: An Investment Action is something done once, or very infrequently, that results in lasting impact over time. This is something like installing a smart thermostat or solar panels. These actions can be logged once, and then they are mastered. The user will continue to get impact for logging this action.
Discrete Actions: Discrete actions are actions that are not necessarily easy to make a habit or easy for the impact to be estimated continuously. This might be something irregular like shopping or selling to a thrift store, looking for products with recycled materials, checking your tire pressure, etc.
Habitual Actions: Once the action is mastered, the user is assumed to have made a habit out of it. The user will then earn daily credit for that action’s impact unless they go for a period without logging. Then the impact credit will stop until the user starts logging the action again.
To sum it up – JouleBug has calculated lots of small impacts. When you log an action, we give you impact credit depending on the type of action. We keep a running total for you, your friends, and your communities.