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The Carbon Footprint of a Supermodel

By crooky | May 15, 2007

Editor’s note: I will be better about writing regularly from now on. I just had a death in the family hot on the heels of moving homes.

On my 50km commute from a meeting in downtown Vancouver to my home in the subburbs (no, the irony is not lost of me that I was commuting as a single passenger in a vehicle and now I’m writing about carbon footprints), I saw an ad on the side of a bus for the 2007 Toyota Matrix that read “Consumes less than a supermodel”. I didn’t laugh. I immediately started thinking about that. Here’s what my thought process looked like:

  1. Okay. Apples and oranges. Supermodels consume tobacco, alcohol and prescription pain killers. Automobiles consume petrochemicals. Unless they’ve come up with a new fuel mix of Camels, Mimosas and Vicodin - this ad is stupid.
  2. Let’s set aside for the moment the idiocy of the average marketing flak at a large automotive manufacturer (I could write for months on that topic but I won’t). If we were to compare apples to apples, what would we compare? The recent debate about which required more combined energy (assuming that energy is generated by fossil fuels in most of North America) to keep on the road - a Toyota Prius or a Hummer - made me think that a cradle-to-grave assessment of a Matrix and a Supermodel would probably be the most methodology to analyze this situation.
  3. How the hell am I going to account for the cradle-to-grave energy impact of a Supermodel? In fact, I don’t really want to get into measuring the energy consumed in producing a supermodel at the “cradle” end of that equation.
Here’s a picture of Linda Evangelista having her breakfast shortly before flying to Milan for a GreenPeace fundraiser.

Well, I actually tried to sit down and logic out everything that I needed to take into consideration and came to the conclusion that it is just too difficult to model for a blog posting. A masters thesis, maybe. Instead, I’d like to draw some comparisons from existing data.

I’m going to assume that your average supermodel does a fair amount of flying - to photo shoots or to Brazil for plastic surgery. To calculate how much CO2 a supermodel produces by flying to these shoots, I used a CO2 emissions calculator to see how much CO2 is produced by a flight to Tokyo from Vancouver. A typical 747 at 80% capacity with our supermodel flying in Business Class (this is not even considering that she probably has a bevy of staff with her) will use around 800 kg of fuel to fly her from Vancouver to Tokyo.

According to this calculator, she is creating 2547kg of CO2 every time she makes that trip. I assumed that a normal supermodel would make at least 12 trips of this length per year which adds up to 30,500kg CO2 per year just to fly her all over the world for photo shoots.

Assuming that the average American would drive their Toyota Matrix about 12,000 miles per year, and that the Matrix gets approximately 31 MPG, that means that a Matrix produces about 4296kg of CO2 per year.

I don’t think I really need to go any further. Clearly, there is an order of magnitude difference in carbon emissions between a supermodel and a Toyota Matrix. Consuming less than a supermodel is, apparently, not difficult.

In contrast, the average long-haul truck logs 125,000 miles/year and gets (at best) 7 mpg. That means that a long-haul truck produces a whopping 192,708kg of CO2 per year. At roughly 2500kg CO2 per international flight for a supermodel, she would only have to make six flights per month to produce this much CO2.

So, my suggestion is that Toyota learns to compare apples to apples and that some of the heavy-duty truck manufacturers like Volvo aim to “consume less than a supermodel”. Slightly off topic but Volvo doesn’t always have the best instincts when it comes to ad copy. I’m referring of course to the incident when a Volvo dealer in Macau lost his franchise after running an ad with a picture of Prince Diana and the tagline, “She’d still be alive if she was in a Volvo.”

Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years. He’s a policy analyst, a communications professional and a competitive intelligence consultant. After work, he fancies himself a comedian of sorts.

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Topics: Cars, Policy, Technology |

3 Responses to “The Carbon Footprint of a Supermodel”

  1. Alison Says:
    May 17th, 2007 at 8:39 pm

    well put my friend; you rock!

  2. Trevor Says:
    May 18th, 2007 at 10:46 am

    I heartily agree about Volvo’s ad copy being, well, less than visible or memorable. In my (admittedly biased) view, they have a good product and would benefit from better promotion. There was one ad that was pretty original and still sticks in my mind, however:

    http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v328/corinne82/25cents/volvo.jpg

  3. Aaron Cruikshank Says:
    May 18th, 2007 at 10:49 am

    I miss my old ‘91 740 GL but my ‘05 Magnum gets better mileage and lots of appreciative glances. The real disadvantage to the Magnum is that it is no longer invisible to the police. The Volvo, for some reason, was. It was like people couldn’t believe that a big, hulking brick like that could go fast enough to speed. Trevor, you and I know better.

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