Gatwick Passengers Excess Baggage

The Gatwick Area Conservation Campaign have tried to make the concept of climate change a bit more visual and tangible. In a new report they calculate that an average passenger who passes through Gatwick departure lounge, is responsible for putting about 312Kg of CO2, which is about 85Kg of carbon into the upper atmosphere.

So to make this more visual they describe this as equivalent to each passenger taking on board 85 bags of soot, and scattering them out of the window.

So for each plane carrying say 200 passengers, that would mean 17,000 bags of soot scattered in the air. And because carbon is more damaging as a greenhouse gas when it’s in the upper atmosphere, that would be equivalent in greenhouse gas terms to 46,000 bags of soot at ground level.

So in summary, that’s 46,000 bags for each aircraft, and Gatwick has 120,000 aircraft taking off each year. That’s one way to visualise the damage being done by one airport in one country.