Frequently Asked Questions

When you see the label, you know that a brand has achieved climate neutrality by cleaning up its historical emissions, and is on a journey to limit carbon emissions from its operations.

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Let’s use our favorite fictional example, a company called InTents. The label on InTents products means that the company has counted up the carbon emissions it’s responsible for, offset all of those emissions, and implemented plans to reduce emissions. It includes all of the carbon emitted over the course of one year making and delivering products or services to customers.

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Say you’re shopping for a tent, and see our label on the InTents website. You check out InTents’ brand profile page and see that InTents certified by measuring 67,145 tonnes of 2021 emissions. You also see that InTents offset them by investing in a forestry project, and plans to change its aluminum tent poles to recycled aluminum to reduce carbon emissions of future tents.

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You’ll find the Climate Neutral Certified label on product packaging, websites, and social media.

Climate Neutral is creating the Climate Neutral Certified label as a trusted consumer standard that shows which companies have achieved carbon neutrality in their operations. Our goal is for our label to become ubiquitous and drive large scale decarbonization around the world.

Climate Neutral was co-founded by Peter Dering of Peak Design and Jonathan Cedar of BioLite. As founders and CEOs of carbon neutral companies, Peter and Jonathan shared the same burning question: Why aren't more companies doing this? The answer: measuring a company’s carbon footprint can take a long time and requires a ton of capital, and these barriers prevent companies from measuring their carbon footprints. Moreover, carbon offsetting is widely misunderstood, misrepresented, and poorly marketed, both to brands and to consumers. Peter and Jonathan decided to fund the launch of Climate Neutral as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in early 2019. We operate as an independent entity, overseen by our Board of Directors, and aligned to achieve our mission to eliminate global carbon emissions.

We have a transparent process and follow industry best practices to ensure good governance practices. Our organization is overseen by a board of directors, advisors, and two separate certification committees (check them out here) and maintained through a multi-stakeholder process. Our certification standards are transparently posted here, and will be continuously updated as needed from our stakeholder feedback process to make sure they are consistent with the latest approaches to corporate responsibility and the current state of the voluntary carbon market.

We believe that the consumer has largely been left out of the picture by other labels and standards, so we’re spending a lot of time thinking about how to make our label meaningful, useful, and trusted.

We also believe that impact doesn’t require complexity, and are committed to making our certification process clear and straightforward.

We shun overhead costs, and believe that the time and resources that companies invest in carbon management should go toward offsets and reductions.

Greenhouse gas emissions are the single most globally damaging form of pollution, and yet, they are mostly unregulated. Every sustainability goal is worthy, but most are irrelevant in a world made uninhabitable by carbon pollution.

Furthermore, efforts to reduce carbon emissions are often aligned with other environmental priorities. For example, recycled metals are typically less carbon intensive, and carbon offsets typically support biodiversity and provide other environmental benefits.

It's everybody's thing. Governments around the world should be regulating emissions, but unfortunately aren't, and we don't have time to spare. Climate change requires immediate action, which is why companies need to take responsibility for their own emissions. We hope this corporate movement will tell policymakers that there is mass public support for carbon regulation, spurring the government to take action.

We make a nice label and you put it on your stuff! We're committed to making Climate Neutral Certified a household name and focusing on both our own marketing strategy and helping our brands communicate their certification to their customers. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. We’re constantly having conversations with the media, and have a presence at top industry events and conferences.

We work hand-in-hand with our brands to help you promote your commitment and certification. And, our brands love to collaborate, so you’ll have the chance to reach new customers through giveaways and network-wide sales.

Sure do - share this website and drop us a line and we'll set you up with what you need to outline the business case!

Climate Neutral is structured as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization so that we can avoid conflicts of interest and be neutral in this whole process. (Neutral...get it?) We don't want commercial interests to get in the way of how we certify companies. And we want your corporate resources to be primarily directed toward making meaningful reductions in your own operations, and to fund high-impact carbon credit projects.

Reach out to us via our Contact page. We look forward to talking.

We certify companies at the brand level, which includes all emissions from making and delivering products and services. This is the only way to eliminate enough carbon and halt climate change. Brands consistently find that it costs less than a percent of revenues to compensate for their whole footprint.

But wait...there’s more. Measuring the entire brand-level footprint is also clearer: to consumers trying to understand the label, and to professionals trying to measure, offset, and reduce their carbon. To the consumer at the supermarket, the spaghetti and the rigatoni more or less the same - why should one be Climate Neutral Certified and the other not? To keep everything clear and to enable brands to take more ambitious action, we only certify at the brand level.

Once your footprint has been measured, you need a plan to lower your future emissions. In many instances, there will be low-hanging fruit – energy efficiency improvements, waste management opportunities, more video chats instead of flying cross-country for a short meeting, and so on. These aren't far-off pledges, but reduction plans for the next 12-24 months. The last step is to compensate for all of last year's emissions. Those emissions already happened, and need to be cleaned up if you’re going to call yourself carbon neutral.  

In order to effectively mitigate the impacts of climate change, all businesses need to have long-term plans for maximizing their reduction efforts across their corporate value chains. And while taking reduction steps is an important solution path, offsetting what we can’t reduce now is always going to be better than doing nothing at all.

There's no easy answer to this question, since the price of a carbon credit depends on the project, as well as market supply and demand. People are often surprised to learn that some carbon credits can be purchased for as little as $7 USD per metric ton. However, every carbon credit project is different, and not all of them offer the same benefits. For that reason, it is important to look closely at the underlying project before you buy a carbon credit.

We advise companies to budget 0.5% of revenues to account for cradle-to-customer carbon emissions. Considering the magnitude of the climate challenge and the confusion many people feel about what to do about it, it's refreshing to know that something meaningful can be done about it for so little.

Even if you don't make a physical product, you have greenhouse gas emissions. Everything from the electricity used to light your office and run your computer to employee work travel counts in calculating your carbon footprint.

It’s hard to create a carbon footprint for an organization that doesn’t yet exist, or hasn’t completed a full year of operations. We recommend folks in those situations get in touch once they have a year under their belt.

On the other end of the spectrum, we’ll take even the largest companies. In fact, that’s the path to our greatest scale and impact.

Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions represent the entirety of a carbon footprint from a company’s activities.  

• Scope 1 signifies direct emissions that come from on-site facilities. This can include the fuel you burn in company vehicles, the natural gas you use to heat your office, or any direct emissions from owned manufacturing plants.
• Scope 2 represents indirect emissions. This is mostly your purchased electricity.
• Scope 3 represents indirect emissions from your supply chain and in most cases makes up the majority of a company’s footprint. Scope 3 represents tCO2 emitted across the entire corporate value chain – that means emissions released from extracting raw materials used for finished products, corporate business travel, employee commuting, shipping and transporting, and more.

To learn more about Scopes 1, 2 and 3, visit World Resource Institute's GHG Protocol homepage found here.

It depends on your company, but for many companies, Scope 3 emissions are the biggest chunk. These are emissions from your value chain: all of the activities you engage in as you create and bring your product to market. Quite often, all of the emissions embedded in the raw materials or services you purchase, the airline miles you fly, the commutes of your employees -- these add up to much more than your electric bill (Scope 2).v

There will always be uncertainty in estimating the entirety of a company’s footprint, if Scope 3 is included. Uncertainties stem from imperfect data collection, oversimplifications of reality to translate dollar values into units of tCO2e, and much more. But don’t let perfect be the enemy of good! Estimating your carbon emissions doesn’t have to be an arduous or expensive process. Climate Neutral has built a tool that combines the power of estimation with the capability to refine with operational data. We need to take action now -- and our tool allows precision where you can muster data and a scientifically sound estimate where you can’t.

Essential. We can’t stop the planet from warming more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels unless we all take a good hard look in the mirror and come up with a plan to reduce our own emissions over time. Accordingly, we require that reduction plans are created and implemented on an annual basis and encourage brands to adopt reduction targets that are consistent with the latest climate science, for example by developing a target through the Science-based Targets Initiative, found here.

We select carbon credits based on our offset requirements which are developed by a continuous review process of the best available standards to ensure companies are utilizing quality credits. Our standard creates a common baseline for all companies so that Climate Neutral Certified means one thing - not 1,000 different things. Feel free to use the Contact Us link and we'll walk you through our logic.

First, give yourself a big pat on the back for this exciting accomplishment! Next, display the Climate Neutral Certified label on your products, website, and marketing materials to share your certification with the world. Continue to work on reducing your emissions and encourage more companies to follow your lead.

Getting certified will have two costs: purchasing carbon credits and a certification fee. The largest of those is your offset purchase. You’ll pay $8-20 per tonne of footprint for offsets, and in total they should cost you less than half a percent of gross revenues.
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You’ll also pay us a certification fee, which helps pay for the work we’re doing to build the movement behind our label -- and to help you get certified to use it. You’ll pay us $0.75 per tonne of your footprint, or less (see our full pricing here). The smaller your footprint, the less you pay us. In a perfect world, everyone’s emissions would be zero and our work would be done!

Yes: If you purchase your own credits, we can send you a list of providers that are in the 1% for the Planet network. And yes: Climate Neutral is a 1% for the Planet non-profit partner, so your certification fee counts toward your contribution, along with any carbon credits you purchase through us.

That's great that you already have a plan - nice work! Now, we just need to make sure it fits our certification requirements. Drop us a line and we'll give you some quick feedback and identify any gaps. You could already be close!