Tradewater: Reducing the world’s carbon footprint

Make a Positive and Permanent Impact on the Environment

Help us prevent catastrophic climate change. Offset your carbon footprint with Tradewater.

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6.7 million tons of CO2e destroyed so far

Our Impact

We find and destroy the most potent greenhouse gases before they are released into the atmosphere. To date, we have eliminated the equivalent of:

1.1 million

homes powered for a year

15.2 billion

miles driven

688 million

gallons of gas used

14.2 million

barrels of oil consumed

Tradewater is dedicated to preventing at least 22 million tons of CO2 equivalent from being released into the atmosphere by 2027.

Receive updates and learn how we can all work together to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Our Approach

Tradewater works to permanently prevent the world’s most potent greenhouse and ozone-depleting gases from releasing into the atmosphere and creates high quality, verified carbon offsets.

A Global Effort

Our global team works to locate potent greenhouse and ozone-depleting gases like refrigerants, halons, and methane.

Permanent Impact

We ensure these gases are permanently prevented from entering the atmosphere through safe containment or destruction.

Highest Quality Verification

We generate high quality carbon offset credits that are third-party verified using the highest industry standards.

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Our Commitment

We are committed to having the greatest possible impact in the fight against climate change and to providing our customers with the highest quality value for their climate investment. When you purchase carbon offsets from Tradewater, you can rest assured that you are contributing to a verified, high impact offset program.

Using standards established by The World Wildlife Foundation, Environmental Defense Fund, and other prominent organizations, Tradewater offsets are among the highest quality carbon credits available on the market.

More information is available in our most recent white paper.

Download the White Paper

From The Blog

Sean Kinghorn and his family

Looking Beyond Your Footprint: An Interview with Sean Kinghorn

We recently had the chance to sit down with our own Sean Kinghorn, our Partnerships and Program Development Strategist, to learn more about his career …

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Harnessing Human Ingenuity to Save Our Planet—and Ourselves

The world recently saw the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer unfold on the big screen. Christopher Nolan’s film made accessible to large swaths of people …

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Remembering our Common Goal: Saving the Planet

We’ve all seen the recent headlines about the consumer class action lawsuit filed against Delta Airlines and the misrepresentation of their carbon-neutral claims. Not long …

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Why Trust is the Real Currency of Carbon Offsets

Trust is an important social construct—an essential one that encourages and enables the public to engage in climate-mitigating endeavors. In the current era of healthy …

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Why Going Beyond Conventional Offsetting is Critical Today

When exploring various pathways to fighting climate change – especially given recent news about how dangerously close we are to hitting the 1.5 degree climate …

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Tim Brown, Tradewater's CEO, giving a speech

Global partnerships pave the way for increased efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change

This week, IPCC published a report which stated, “Continued greenhouse gas emissions will lead to increasing global warming, with the best estimate of reaching 1.5°C …

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Learn why our work matters right now

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Permanence

Emission reductions are considered permanent if they are not reversible. In some projects, such as forestry or soil preservation, carbon offset credits are issued based upon the volume of CO2 that will be sequestered over future decades—but human actions and natural processes such as forest fires, disease, and soil tillage can disrupt those projects. When that happens, the emission reductions claimed by the project are reversed.

The destruction of halocarbon does not carry this risk. All destruction activities in Tradewater’s projects are conducted pursuant to the Montreal Protocol , which requires “a destruction process” that “results in the permanent transformation, or decomposition of all or a significant portion of such substances.” Specifically, the destruction facilities Tradewater uses must meet or exceed the recommendations of the UN Technology & Economic Assessment Panel , which approves certain technologies to destroy halocarbons, including the requirement that the technology achieve a 99.99% or higher “destruction and removal efficiency.” Simply put, this means that Tradewater’s technologies ensure that over 99.99% of the chemicals are permanently destroyed. During the destruction process, a continuous emission monitoring system is used to ensure full destruction of the ODS collected.

Accuracy

Some carbon offset projects necessarily rely on estimations or assumptions when calculating the emission reductions from project activities. Forestry projects, where developers make assumptions about the carbon that will be sequestered over future decades if trees are conserved, are a perfect example. Such projects sometimes result in an overestimation of the environmental benefit of the project.

Tradewater’s halocarbon projects avoid the issue of overestimation by consistently conducting extremely precise testing and measurement of the amount of refrigerant destroyed in each project.

  • Every container of ODS that Tradewater destroys is weighed by a third-party using regularly calibrated scales. The ODS is then sampled by a third-party and analyzed by an accredited refrigerant laboratory to determine its species and purity. These two steps combine to ensure that credits are issued only for the precise volume and type of refrigerant destroyed.
  • The destruction facilities that Tradewater uses continuously monitor the incineration process during destruction events to ensure that over 99.99% of the ODS is destroyed. This monitoring is mandated by regulatory protocols and is part of the verification process to which projects are subjected.
  • Tradewater accounts for the project emissions created during the collection, transport, and destruction of ODS, and the number of offsets issued is reduced by a corresponding amount. The protocols that we use also build in other reductions to account for substitute chemicals that will be used to replace the destroyed refrigerants. Tradewater publishes this information in the documentation for all its ODS destruction projects. These documents outline how the material was obtained, the project emissions calculations, the test results, and the amount and type of ODS chemicals destroyed, among other information.

    • Additionality

    It is a basic requirement of all carbon offset projects that the underlying project activities are additional. “Additional” means that the projects would not happen in the absence of a carbon market. Tradewater’s halocarbon projects simply would not happen – and the gases would be left to escape into the atmosphere – without the sale of the resulting carbon offset credits. This is because there is no mandate to collect and destroy these gases. It is still permissible to buy, sell, and use halocarbons that were produced before the ban. There are other reasons halocarbon destruction projects are additional:

    • There are no incentives or financial mechanisms to encourage halocarbon destruction. According to the International Energy Agency and United Nations Environment Program, “there is rarely funding nor incentive” to recover and destroy ozone depleting substances in storage tanks and discarded equipment. And collecting, transporting, and destroying halocarbons is time-intensive and expensive. The burden to collect and destroy these gases therefore remains prohibitive outside of carbon offset markets—meaning that if organizations like Tradewater do not do this work, nobody else will.
    • Countries are not focused on the need to collect and destroy halocarbons. The Montreal Protocol has been celebrated as a success because of its production ban. This success, however, ignores the legacy gases produced before the ban and is a blind spot for government regulators. In the U.S., for example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) developed a Vintaging Model in the 1990s to estimate the quantify of ozone depleting substances left in circulation. Based on the inputs and assumptions put into the model, the EPA predicted that no CFCs would be available for recovery beyond 2020 in the United States. But this prediction did not prove accurate. Tradewater has collected and destroyed more than 1.5 million pounds of CFCs globally in recent years and continues to identify thousands of pounds per week.
    • International carbon accounting standards do not require corporations to measure or track emissions tied to halocarbons, and refrigerants are specifically excluded from Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) commitments. These commitments derive from emissions reporting under the GHG Protocol, which requires companies to report on emissions only from new generation refrigerants, such as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), but does not establish any obligation to report inventories or emissions of refrigerants still in use, such as CFCs and HCFCs. All these factors combine to make Tradewater’s carbon offset projects highly additional. As Giving Green, an initiative of IDinsight, concluded: “Tradewater would not exist without the offset market, so this element of additionality is clearly achieved.” The case for additionality is not so clear for some other project types, such as forestry and landfill gas carbon projects. For example, some forests are already being conserved for their beauty, or for use as parks, and generate carbon offset credits only because those conservation efforts do not yet have full formal protection in place to avoid deforestation in the future. Similarly, methane from landfills can be used to make electricity or captured as compressed natural gas, thereby creating additional revenue streams to support the activities, beyond the sale of carbon credits.