James knew that leading a carbon neutral initiative would be quite an undertaking. The project required a lot of research. We’re talkin’ an extreme amount of Googling and reading and maths and consulting and…you get the point.
Carbon offsetting is a fairly new, complex industry and it’s something we really wanted to get right. And guess what? We think we did just that, thanks to the tireless work of James Castles. Interestingly enough, James started as the company’s first intern, but that’s neither here nor there. Let’s chat about carbon!
First things first, who are you?
Hi, my name's James. I'm the Head of Special Projects at Who Gives a Crap. One of my passions is sustainability, so I'm also essentially acting as our interim Sustainability Manager at the moment.
What do you mean by special projects? How special are we talking?
It's a great question. I don’t quite have a pithy answer, besides VERY special, obviously. Essentially, the team I lead looks after projects that are generally quite strategic in nature, fairly high impact and often sit across a lot of different functions. They also usually involve breaking new ground for our business. We have this as a fairly new, dedicated team because, in the past, we had a lot of great ideas that we always wanted to do, but sometimes struggled to get them going. Part of the problem was that all of our function heads or other project leads have so much responsibility in their core day-to-day – it’d sometimes be hard to get these new one-off things across the line and they might fall through the cracks.
Well I guess that kind of addresses my next question. I think a lot of people might be wondering why we didn’t go carbon neutral for shipping sooner. What have we been doing? Have we been busy?
Haha, the short answer is yes. We’ve been busy.
The long answer is that it's hard, but I don't have a really good answer for why we didn't do this sooner. Sustainability is really important to our business, and it's something we're really passionate about. We've baked it into the way we've designed our products and our packaging. But carbon has always been a bit of an elephant in the room. We've wanted to address it for quite a long time, but we just haven't been able to find the right way to do it. It is a complex issue. We know we're seen as a trusted leader in the market, so we wanted to make sure we’d done our due diligence.
So where did you even start? There are so many opinions and players when it comes to carbon offsetting. It must have been overwhelming.
It certainly was a bit overwhelming, but luckily I enjoy learning new things. I started by just going in with an open mind and exploring. I read just about everything written publicly about carbon neutrality and carbon offsets. Then I started having conversations with experts in our networks, like environmental experts and carbon offset specialists. We have some great connections at a few environmental nonprofits in the US especially, and they had some great insights too. I really wanted to get a range of opinions to understand what the issues were and what the landscape looked like.
Through doing that, it became pretty clear there's two approaches you can take to carbon offsetting. One is a very out-of-the-box, one-size-fits-all solution, and one is more bespoke. The out-of-the-box solution can be quite easy and fast, but you have a lot less control over what the outcome is. The calculation of your emissions is also not always so accurate, especially for a product like ours. Our boxes are quite bulky. It's atypical for eCommerce, so using a really standard number, which a lot of companies offer, was not accurate enough for what we want to do. So the first thing we did…
Wait, we’re not at the first thing yet?? What was all of this research?
Haha, that was getting us ready for the real first thing – calculating our carbon emissions. We started working on a life cycle assessment, or LCA, which is a really big end-to-end analysis of our environmental impact. We've now completed the analysis on the shipping part of our footprint, which we know is significant and very top of mind for customers. Once we knew our shipping footprint, we could start looking for partners or projects we could use to offset those emissions.
What were the main considerations you had when researching potential partners?
Cool. All right. Let’s talk about it.
Oh you’re about to drop some real knowledge, aren’t you?
Haha, sure am. The way the carbon offset market works is you've got project developers – these are the people that tend to work on the ground. They're usually nonprofits, and they are the ones that usually execute a project that produces carbon credits. They can be smaller organisations that don’t have a global reach, so they’ll end up working with brokers who keep a portfolio of projects to sell to clients. Carbon brokers work with clients (in this case, us), to choose offsets projects that are of interest or relevant to them, and their business and their customers.
So Pachama is our offset broker?
Yes. We liked them for a whole slew of reasons, but some of the biggest reasons are that they’re forestry specialists and they're very tech-focused. They actually do their own level of verification and vetting of carbon offsets that they sell using some really cool tech that has the potential to be a game-changer for forestry-based carbon offsets. The fact that they exclusively work with forestry projects is great because protecting trees and forests is something we really connect with as a company and we know is really important to our customers. Pachama’s quite a young company, so there's a bit of a startuppy cultural connection there. And finally, we love working with new mission-driven businesses - which they are.
Wow, James. It seems like you really learned a lot in the process.
Oh I definitely did. I've got a working document which is just like 80 or 90 pages of my own notes. I don't come from a sustainability background, and I needed to do a lot of work to get myself comfortable and make sure that we were doing something that we could stand behind. I'm really happy with the outcome, so it feels like it was worth it, but, yeah, it was a lot of work.
What was the most surprising thing that you learned or the most interesting?
It was really cool to learn how a lot of these projects have so many more benefits than just carbon reduction.
“A lot of these projects have so many more benefits than just carbon reduction.”
How so? Because they create job opportunities and that sort of thing?
Yep! A great example is the project we chose – the Brazil Nut Concessions, which is in the Peruvian Amazon. One of the ways this project works is by increasing the viability and the value of the local market for Brazil nuts, which are a type of nut that can only be harvested from intact rainforests. This is typically done at a very small scale by local members of the community. We're helping give a greater economic incentive for the local communities to protect the rainforests intact, which is really cool. In a nutshell (hehe), this kind of offset project helps to support and develop local communities, which is fantastic, but also protecting these beautiful, diverse rainforests. Does that make sense?
Oh interesting! Yeah, that does make sense. Do you know some of the specific ways the project incentivises nut harvesting?
For sure! One of the specific things the carbon financing helps do is construct a processing facility for the Brazil nuts so they can process them locally, which means that you're selling a more valuable product. It's also helped them get an organic certification, which is something that can really increase the value of their harvests.
To be clear, it’s not that people in these communities want to destroy beautiful forests, but often they’re between a rock and a hard place. If logging or slash and burn agriculture is the only way for them to make a living, then unfortunately it is going to happen. There are also significant problems with trespassers entering protected Amazon areas for illegal logging, mining and land clearing. The carbon financing we’re helping to fund not only helps create a greater incentive for locals to protect their forests and earn a living, but also equips them with the tools, training and resources (including financial) to combat illegal logging and enforce local protections better. Projects like this are really a win-win for people and the planet!
Amazing. After all of this research, do you have a particular fondness for Brazil nuts? Or are you sick of them?
Well, I don't think I've ever eaten Brazil nuts. I really need to go and try them!
I love Brazil nuts. They're delish, highly recommend.
That’s all I needed to hear.
Ok, what is a piece of advice you’d give to someone at another organisation who was starting this process?
I think it's really helpful to go in with quite an open mind and give yourself the space to just go down some of these rabbit holes and on some of these tangents because you kind of need to do that to learn and understand the subject matter better. If I’d gone in with too strict of a goal, I might have ended up closing my mind off to other options that proved really interesting or useful.
That's really powerful. For better or for worse, carbon neutrality is sort of a buzzword right now. As you alluded to, I think companies are scrambling to figure out how they can achieve that status as quickly as possible. It's better than nothing, but it seems like they’re just trying to check boxes. It sounds like your approach was much more holistic.
Yeah, and it’s very easy to check that box if you want to. There are partners or approaches out there that would have let us do this in an hour. But I don't think that the quality of that outcome would have been anywhere near what we'll have achieved...Oh! I just thought of something else that was super interesting that I learned.
Please tell!
There's a perception, I think, among customers that because our production is based in China and our customers are based primarily in Australia, the US, and UK, that the footprint or the emissions of the sea freight from China to, for example, the US would be really, really significant, probably far larger than the emission of the road freight, which is going from our local warehouse out to the customer.
In actuality, our sea freight, even though it's over a lot greater distance, produces less emissions than our road freight. This is largely because sea freight is a lot more efficient from a carbon perspective. This is especially true for our US orders where 80% of the average end-to-end transport emissions come from the delivery from the warehouse to the customer. So there's a really significant upside from an environmental perspective to add additional warehouses and ideally put them close to the coast. That way, we can reduce the amount of distance a box is traveling via road and increase the amount it's traveling via sea, which is a much better outcome from a carbon perspective.
“There are partners or approaches out there that would have let us do this in an hour. But I don’t think that the quality of that outcome would have been anywhere near what we’ll have achieved.”
That is so interesting. And really shows that carbon neutrality is just one piece of the puzzle.
Exactly. That’s why I’m really excited to get the final LCA which will include production insights as well. It will really help us personalise strategies like the introduction of solar and renewable energy at production sites, for example.
So really, we’re still in the very beginning. I mean it’s a super exciting first step – I don’t mean to minimise all the work you’ve done.
No no, not at all. This announcement is a part of our carbon strategy, not the end of it. This is step one. This is the start. We definitely want to look at what carbon neutrality would mean for our entire product lifecycle end-to-end. We want to look at what a really scientific, sophisticated, smart supply chain strategy is over a number of years because a lot of these things are hard to do and take time to execute. So this is our starting point. I’m confident our products already have a lower carbon footprint than many of our competitors, especially because we use recycled or bamboo fibres and they don’t. But in a few years, I think we can unequivocally be the best in the market.
This is incredible, James. Do your parents know about all this work you’ve done?
No, not yet. I don't think I've told them.
What? They're going to be so proud of you!
I’m sure they will be. Although my dad's a bit of a sceptic in this department!
Oh, that’s hilarious.
If you want to learn more about our decision to go carbon neutral and the project our offsets support, we’ve written an in-depth Q&A here. Now, go congratulate James in the comments!
An update: In great news for both the project and the planet, the Brazil Nut Concessions has now sold all of its available offsets! As a result, we’ve shifted our attention (and offsetting) to a new project - specifically, Agrocortex in Brazil and Central Kalimantan Peatlands in Indonesia. The Agrocortex project protects an area of untouched rainforest in Brazil’s most biodiverse region from deforestation. You can read more about it here - we think it’s pretty great! The Central Kalimantan Peatlands project is equally awesome - it aims to reduce Indonesia’s emissions by preserving 15,091 hectares of tropical peat swamp forests (home to creatures like the endangered Bornean orangutan).