Carbon Offsetting 101: Minimizing Your Merch Campaign's Impact

We all know that emissions – greenhouse gasses, carbon emissions, and the like – are one of the primary driving factors behind climate change. Everyone who wants to do anything more than pay lip service to the environment knows about carbon emissions. Because of this, many, if not most, business owners are familiar with the term "carbon offsetting."

The trouble is that most of those same business owners don't actually know what carbon offsetting is, how it works, and its pros and cons. Is it something your business should pursue? How does it work? Should you use it to help offset your merchandising, or are there other alternatives?

There's a lot of ground to cover here, so let's get started.

Understanding Carbon Emissions

First, let's start with a brief primer on carbon emissions, so you know why carbon offsetting is important.

Carbon emissions are specifically referring to carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon dioxide is common and unavoidable (we breathe it out as a byproduct of existing, after all), and it is responsible for a significant amount of global warming.

Greenhouse gasses include CO2, but also other gasses with similar effects, like methane.

The reason carbon emissions are so commonly discussed is because they are, well, common. Every internal combustion engine, many different manufacturing processes, and more are all likely producing CO2 as a byproduct.

CO2 is natural, but our planet is only equipped to keep so much of it in balance. As deforestation increases, the amount the planet can process decreases while the amount we produce as a species increases.

As a business, you can often do a lot to help reduce your carbon impact. Some companies strive to be carbon-neutral, meaning they remove as much carbon as they produce. Other businesses are able to reach carbon negativity, where they remove more carbon than they produce. Most businesses, though, simply can't achieve either of these on their own.

There's very little way, for example, to ship a product from one place to another without some kind of associated carbon emissions. While electric vehicles are helping with this, even the power used to fuel them often comes from sources that produce carbon emissions.

Enter Carbon Offsetting

Carbon offsetting is an umbrella term for a list of strategies that allow a brand to offset its carbon emissions by investing in carbon removal elsewhere.

A simple example would be if a business donates some portion of its profits to an agency that plants trees. Those trees help reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. By doing good in this manner, the business offsets its negative impact on the environment.

There are two different reasons why you might pursue carbon offsetting and two different kinds of carbon offsetting. Let's talk about both pairs.

Reasons for Carbon Offsetting

The two main reasons a business would pursue carbon offsetting are through voluntary initiatives and through compliance.

Voluntary offsetting happens when a business has set up and established a set of environmental and social governance guidelines that stipulate some level of benefit to the environment. This is most often the case with brands that make carbon neutrality, green operations, or environmentally friendly operations a core pillar of their operations. Brands like Patagonia, Seventh Generation, and IKEA all make environmental sustainability a key part of their business ethos and fall into this category.

The flip side of this – and in some ways its opposite – is compliance offsetting. This is where the business operates under some kind of regulations, such as the European Union Emission Trading Scheme, and must comply with certain carbon goals in order to maintain certification and operation. In some cases, compliance is important for an ESG organization; in others, it's essential for even the most basic ability to operate.

The third option is not pursuing offsetting at all, which many businesses still choose, but since "choosing not to participate" isn't really a valid strategy to save the environment, we're not going to talk about it. Much. More on that later.

Types of Carbon Offsetting

Now, let's talk about the two kinds of carbon offsetting. These are carbon removal and carbon avoidance.

Carbon avoidance is the cheaper of the two methods and involves the money your business spends being used to prevent carbon emissions from happening in the first place. It's a preventative measure.

For example:

• You might pay to provide alternative fuels for towns to prevent them from burning wood for fuel.
• You might pay to protect an area of rainforest or old-growth forest, maintaining the trees
• You might sponsor a shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy.

In contrast, carbon removal is the active process of removing carbon emissions from the atmosphere. This isn't a simple task – you can't just fly a plane up into the ozone layer and scoop up CO2 – but there are some ways it can be done.

Carbon removal can be directly from a source, such as installing direct air capture carbon scrubbers at the emissions point in a power plant. Or it can be less direct, like planting more trees and reforesting previously ravaged areas. There are a lot of options throughout the ecosystem, many of which rely on biological processes to sequester carbon, which can then be stored in a way that it isn't re-released.

There's a significant drawback to this method, which we'll discuss later.

What Are the Benefits of Carbon Offsetting?

So, what are the benefits of carbon offsetting for your business? How does it play into your merchandising plans?

One of the biggest roadblocks a company can reach in terms of green operations and environmental sustainability is the limit to what they can do. At some point, products need to be shipped, no matter how locally they were produced. At some point, you can't reduce your company's emissions any more.

Carbon offsetting is a way for you to continue to do good in the world beyond what you can accomplish on your own. You might not have the resources, leverage, or power to enact change, but you can help fund those who do. Ideally, the global community can come together to reach overall global carbon neutrality and, eventually, carbon negativity. We have it within us as a species to turn back the clock and undo the damage we've done, no matter how dire the circumstances may seem.

There are also economic benefits to carbon offsetting.

• You can use it in your marketing; people who care about the environment as one of their top issues are more likely to view your brand favorably if you have a tangible investment in carbon offsetting.
• Carbon offsetting can create jobs and foster economic growth, and your contributions help the world as a whole on that front.
• Carbon offsetting can also help foster development in developing nations, help them skip past the advancements the developed world made on the back of environmental damage, and bring us all closer to a green future.

And, of course, at the end of the day, it's all about the environment. If the world burns around us, we can't really do business, now can we?

Are There Drawbacks to Carbon Offsetting?

There are three primary drawbacks to carbon offsetting, and they all have to do with how it's implemented, how it's enforced, and how it's verified.

Carbon Offsets In Lieu of Responsibility

The first issue with carbon offsetting is from the management of a business deciding to use it in lieu of its own responsibility. All too often, when you give corporations a way to exchange money for the appearance of doing good, without any requirement to actually do good themselves, they're going to take it.

With carbon offsets, the idea is that your investments are tracked through the use of carbon offset credits. A business can purchase these credits, which go on to do the amount of good the credit is worth.

Up above, when framing carbon offsetting as a practice, we talk about when a business has taken every action it can to decrease its own carbon emissions and wants to continue doing good for the world around it. When it works that way, it's great.

Unfortunately, when a company sees the ability to pay to offset their emissions, they may take it as a license to ignore those emissions and pay for the offset credits as a sort of fee or fine. In rare cases, a company might even take it as a chance to pay and increase their emissions; after all, they're offsetting them, right?

Carbon offsetting only works when you've done all you can on your own already, not as a replacement for your company's efforts and changes.

The Sketchy Reputation of Carbon Credit Trackers

The second issue with carbon offsets is the companies that position themselves as credit vendors and trackers. These are businesses whose purpose is to issue carbon credits, steward the money, and see that it goes to the purpose it was meant to serve.

Unfortunately, very few of these companies have proven to be reputable or trustworthy. There's no equivalent of Fairtrade International for carbon offsets; instead, it's a series of companies with good-sounding names but very little proof to back things up. Moreover, they often include their own fees and other surcharges that siphon off money that should be going toward environmental support.

This is not to say all such companies are fraudulent, of course. It's just very important to do your due diligence to find one that is proven to be effective.

The Carbon Credit Grift

The third and most important issue with carbon offsets is how ineffective it is.

Companies pop up to offer carbon credits, and businesses buy in, never realizing that the company has no intention of providing any actual progress toward carbon remediation. Some of them were scams from the get-go; others pocket most of the money. Some invest in carbon sequestration technologies that are not yet functional or proven, and while investing in scientific advancement isn't bad, there are more immediate and tangible ways the money can be used.

A study from just a couple of years ago showed that over 90% of carbon offsets amounted to nothing. This, along with the first reason listed above, combine to make carbon offsets a lot less valuable than they may appear.

Carbon Offsets to Minimize Your Merchandise Campaign Impact

If you're starting up a merchandising campaign, and your overall goal is to reduce the impact you have on the environment, there's a lot you can do.

Carbon offsets can be fine. As mentioned above, while there is a lot of grift and fraud in the carbon offsetting industry, there are legitimate organizations you can donate to directly, which will be more than happy to receive your funding and put it to good use.

You can also take steps to minimize the carbon emissions in your merchandise. Working with us is a great example. Most of our apparel and other products are produced as locally as we can possibly arrange, from the place the cotton is grown to the place the shirts are printed. We do everything in our power to make sure our merchandise is as sustainable as possible, so you don't have to worry about it.

Sometimes, though, there's just not a lot you can do. Some products can't be made locally. Some need to be shipped across the oceans, no matter what you are buying. Some even hide their emissions. We don't, but you don't have to take our word for it. We have the receipts; all you need to do is ask.

When it comes down to it, there's no one-size-fits-all solution for sustainable operations. You need to evaluate your merchandise campaign and decide how much the carbon emissions matter in the grand scheme of things and how much effort you can go through to reduce them. Sometimes, that time and money might be better spent on more impactful methods, from reengineering business processes to building partnerships with companies doing good work around the world. The important thing is doing what you can, whatever that may be.