Making your carbon footprint smaller is becoming an ever- present part of our daily lives, and these five websites give you information to make it easier.

Good

While Good magazine is printed on environmentally friendly paper, its mission of offering sustainable lifestyle choices is put into practice by offering much of the content online.

Aimed at forward-thinking New Zealanders who want to live their lives with less impact on the environment, Good.net.nz is a fantastic compendium of relevant articles, archived from past issues of the printed version.

From how carbon became the C-word of the 21st century to choosing between diesel and hybrid cars, hours can be spent on this site learning about better lifestyle choices. Check out the Good blog, updated when sustainable products and services are made available to Kiwis.

Greenpeace

As a global organisation, Greenpeace focuses on the most threatening issues to our planet's environment. New Zealand has a strong Greenpeace affiliation (we were the second country to instigate international environment actions under the Greenpeace umbrella), and the website greenpeace.org/new-zealand is perfect for Kiwis who want to continue making a difference in the world.

Keeping enviro- fanatics updated with live news feeds from across the globe, this website can be visited multiple times a day for new world happenings.

Fairtrade

Doing good things for the environment also means doing good things for the people in it. Across Australasia, more and more consumers are making the change to buy Fairtrade, and fairtrade.org.nz lets you know where you can find products that don't cause harm to the people that manufacture them.

From a daily cafe latte to fruit and vege, uncover where you can buy your sundries locally on this website. This site also features downloadable resources for promoting the organisation's goals in your workplace.

Sustainable Living

If you're looking for a more entertaining way to learn about a sustainable lifestyle, check out sustainableliving.org.nz. This website organises courses and workshops all over New Zealand to educate you about reducing your carbon footprint, enabling families and individuals to put sustainability into practice.

Find a one-off or term-based course to show you the functional ways of helping the environment, covering topics including waste reduction and conservative power use. If you can't make it to a course, you'll also find informative Action Guide PDF files for download, which simplify the energy efficiency experience.

Carbon Zero

Providing households with tools to measure, manage and mitigate emissions, carbonzero.co.nz is a treasure of online resources. Government owned, the Carbon Zero programme makes real monitoring of your home's generation of greenhouse gas emissions easy.

Using the calculators on this website, you can get an estimate of your home, school or business' total energy use, and find out what effect it has on the environment. For greenies on the go, this website also features an emissions calculator for domestic and overseas travel.

- © Fairfax NZ News