- What’s on this page?
- Track your carbon footprint: Klima
- Search online using green energy: Ecosia
- Use green grid electricity: WhenToPlugIn
- Plan your switch to solar: PV Calculator
- Find your nearest EV charger: Gridserve
- Check local recycling: Horizon
- Cut your plastic waste: My Little Plastic Footprint
- Find water and coffee refills: Refill
- Find ethical fashion: Good on You
- Buy and sell preloved clothes: Vinted
- Find free preloved furniture: Freecycle
- Get cheap food: Too Good to Go
- Share surplus food: Olio
- Get recipes for ingredients you've already got: Kitche
- We downloaded and tested more than 100 free apps for Android and iPhone
- Below we reveal the 14 apps that can genuinely help you cut your carbon footprint and reduce what you throw away
- All these apps are recently updated and completely free to use
Switching to a sustainable lifestyle needn’t be expensive or difficult. You can make a start for free using any one of the free apps in this article – and many will save you money as well as cutting your carbon footprint.
The best green apps cover a range of categories. Some help you track your carbon emissions and switch to renewable energy, while others help limit what goes to landfill by trading preloved fashion and cutting your food waste.
If you’re looking for some free apps that do a particular job, such as plan your solar panels or find an electric vehicle (EV) charging point, jump to it using our quick list below. Otherwise, read on to explore all the ways your phone can help protect the planet.
What’s on this page?
- Track your carbon footprint: Klima
- Search online using green energy: Ecosia
- User greener grid electricity: WhenToPlugIn
- Plan your switch to solar panels: PV Calculator
- Find the nearest EV charger: Gridserve
- Check your local recycling: Horizon Sustainability Scanner
- Cut your plastic waste: My Little Plastic Footprint
- Find water and coffee refills: Refill
- Find ethical fashion and beauty: Good on You
- Buy and sell preloved clothes: Vinted
- Find free preloved furniture: Freecycle
- Find unsold food: Too Good to Go
- Share surplus food: Olio
- Get recipes for the food in your cupboard: Kitche
Track your carbon footprint: Klima
- Free for Android
How big is your carbon footprint, and what can you do to shrink it? To find out, answer Klima’s survey questions – for example how you travel to work, how big your home is and whether you eat meat.
You can also tell it how often you fly by plane, and whether you have renewables such as solar panels or heat pumps installed. It instantly uses your answers to estimate your annual carbon footprint.
Klima as one of our best free apps helps you reduce your carbon emissions by making changes. Along the way, you get tailored tips for cutting back on emissions and saving money.
Unfortunately Klima is Android only. The best iOS alternative is Oreoco, which is not currently available. Keep an eye on Oreoco’s website for news on its relaunch.
Search online using green energy: Ecosia
Using the internet is a massive energy drain. Every time you search in Google, your request is sent to several huge servers – basically vast computers – whose energy usage would make your eyes water. The addition of AI to Google has driven its carbon cost dramatically higher.
There is a green alternative to Google – free app and browser extension Ecosia. It calls itself “the climate positive search engine”, and it is powered by 100% renewable energy. It’s private and secure, so it protects your data as well as limiting your carbon emissions.
The app is free and has no adverts, but the company is still a business – and it uses all its profits to plant trees. As a result, according to Ecosia’s blog, every search removes about 1 kg of CO2 from the atmosphere. If only big tech worked like this.
Use green grid electricity: WhenToPlugIn
You may know when your energy tariff is cheapest, but when is it greenest? This clever app from the UK’s National Grid reveals exactly when the electricity in your home will be cleanest over the next 48 hours.
One of the best green free apps on the market when grid electricity comes from sustainable sources such as wind power and solar power. It also measures the amount of carbon emitted by the current mix of electricity sources, both nationally and in your area.
Use the app’s carbon intensity forecast to estimate what time of day to run your appliances for the lowest carbon emissions. You can even set an alert for when your grid electricity supply falls below a certain level of carbon emissions, so you know it’s time to put the kettle on. Anyone for green tea?
Plan your switch to solar: PV Calculator
- Free for Android
This powerful but easy-to-use tool is one of the best green free apps available for those who want to make their life greener.
It uses location-specific weather data from NASA to predict the output of solar panels in any position, right down to different bits of your roof. It’s a brilliant tool for helping you decide where and how to install panels on your house or in your garden – anywhere in the world.
Users absolutely love PV Calculator, giving it an average 4.3 score in the Google Play Store. Just a shame it’s not available for iPhone.
Get free solar panel quotes
Answer a few quick questions, and our trusted installers will send you bespoke solar panel quotes – for free.
Find your nearest EV charger: Gridserve
- Free for Android and iOS
Need to top up your electric vehicle’s battery on the road? Fire up the free Gridshare app and it’ll direct you to your nearest EV charging point.
It also reveals what connectors are available at that location, what hours they’re open, and how much they charge per kilowatt. You can also limit your search using filters such as minimum charge speed and number of connectors available.
You can create an account and save your most-visited charging points, but you don’t need an account to use the app.
Get free EV charging point quotes
Answer a few quick questions, and our trusted installers will send you bespoke EV charging point quotes – for free.
Check local recycling: Horizon
Another one of our free apps is Horizon, aka Horizon Sustainability Scanner, reveals what you can and can’t recycle in your local area.
If most of your household waste falls under the “can’t” category for doorstep collections, the app will help you find recycling points further afield. You can even scan a product’s barcode to check its recycling details. We had a few problems when testing the scanning feature, but we love the idea.
Cut your plastic waste: My Little Plastic Footprint
- Free for Android and iOS
Plastic weighs nothing, right? Well, 22 million kilos of it end up in the ocean every single day. That’s just one of many sobering facts we discovered from the Quiz section of this app, where you’ll find plenty more info about the plastic crisis and tips for cutting back.
Like Klima, My Little Plastic Footprint also uses a survey to calculate your footprint. This time you get a “PMI” – a Plastic Mass Index, a plastic version of your BMI (body mass index). The higher your PMI, the more you need to go on a “plastic diet”. We find the diet analogy a bit creepy, and the user interface is not particularly intuitive, but the Quiz tab is genuinely enlightening.
Find water and coffee refills: Refill
Stop buying (and throwing away) plastic water bottles and coffee cups! You can get free refills in more places than you may expect.
Created by Bristol-based charity City to Sea, this free app uses your current location to reveal where you can fill up your water bottle gratis. Participating restaurants and cafes can display a Refill sticker in the window, so you know you’ve gone to the right place.
City to Sea claims there are more than 274,000 Refill stations globally, and that their app has avoided more than 100 million pieces of plastic to date. We didn’t have much luck finding free coffee refills, but the water refill map works well, if a little slowly – and you have to create a free account to use it.
Find ethical fashion: Good on You
How ethical and sustainable are your favourite brands of jeans or makeup? This app lets you look up more than 3,000 brands to see how they rank on labour practices, environmental credentials and animal welfare.
You can skip straight to the best ethical performers by tapping ‘Browse by category’, choosing Fashion or Beauty and then picking a sub-category, such as Skincare. You’ll then see the best-performing brands at the top, and you can refine your search by price or ethical rating. This is a brilliantly designed app that we found particularly quick and easy to use.
Buy and sell preloved clothes: Vinted
- Free for Android and iOS
- Free website
Buying new clothes is one of the least sustainable things we do. The average UK shopper buys nearly 30 kilos of new outfits every year, and about three-quarters of it ends up in landfill. Fashion production currently accounts for more than 2.1 billion tonnes of emissions per year – and fast fashion is an ethical nightmare. Here’s the best way to avoid it: buy second hand.
Vinted has revolutionised second hand clothes shopping. This stuff is not just someone’s unwanted rubbish. It’s a goldmine of vintage fashion, limited edition pieces and designer bargains, plus a new section for electronics. The app is incredibly easy to use, too, and there are no selling fees.
Find free preloved furniture: Freecycle
- Free website
- Coming soon to Android and iOS
Freecycle has been around for years but still doesn’t have a mobile app, although there’s one in the works (we’ll keep you updated). Meanwhile, use the website to trade unwanted items for free in your local community.
It takes seconds to create an account, and you can get listing or searching immediately. It’s a great way to clear out the loft without adding to landfill. You’ll find some amazing stuff being given away, too, from kitchen appliances to vintage clothes.
Beware of imitators! If you search for “Freecycle” in the App Store or Play Store you’ll find “FREES – Trash nothing”. It is not the real Freecycle, and just wants to sell you premium upgrades.
Get cheap food: Too Good to Go
The UK throws away around 9.5 million tonnes of food waste every year – even though 8.4 million people in the UK are in food poverty. This country’s annual food waste alone could feed roughly 30 million people.
Using one of the free apps in this list may seem helpless in the face of such monumental waste, but Too Good to Go is a brilliantly effective step in the right direction. It lists all the food that local shops and other outlets would have to throw away at the end of the day, and lets you buy it at knock-down prices.
You have to sign up to use it, but you can use your Google account and it takes seconds. All the food is safe to eat, but because of health and safety rules around commercial outlets it would otherwise go in the bin.
Share surplus food: Olio
Olio is similar to Too Good to Go, but as well as letting you buy cheap end-of-day food it lets you find a good home for your own decent food that would otherwise go to waste.
For example, if you’re going on holiday and have a full fridge that needs emptying, or you’ve got homegrown veg to spare, you can offload it via Olio. Take a photo of the food and share it with your local Olio community for buying or free collection.
Olio includes an in-app purchase, but it’s a simple upgrade to paying supporter (£2.99 per month or £17.99 per year). You can still use the service without upgrading.
Get recipes for ingredients you’ve already got: Kitche
Here’s another clever but simple way to reduce food waste: make better use of the stuff you’ve got. Kitche is basically a recipe app, but only using the ingredients you already have in your fridge or cupboard. If you scan receipts or barcodes, it’ll even alert you when your items are approaching their use-by dates.
