Small Businesses Can Now Join Together to Fight Climate Change

Della Brown

Tradewater was built on the idea that many small actions can have a large collective impact. We have collected and destroyed over 1.2 million pounds of harmful refrigerant gases – equaling more than 5.1 million tons of CO2 – by aggregating together cylinders and cans as small as 12 ounces. We’ve now taken that ethos and developed a new program for small and medium sized business: The Carbon Neutral Collective.

What is The Carbon Neutral Collective?

The Carbon Neutral Collective is a group of small and medium sized businesses who have committed to fighting climate change by offsetting their individual carbon footprints, together.

As a member, each business first calculates their carbon footprint using our proprietary calculator, then offsets those emissions by purchasing carbon offset credits, and finally, makes a plan to reduce their emissions over time. By aggregating the impact of these small businesses and helping them promote their climate commitments to their neighbors, partners, and customers, The Carbon Neutral Collective aims to have a huge collective impact.

What Does Carbon Neutrality Mean for Small Businesses?

Being carbon neutral means the net greenhouse gas emissions from all of a business’s activities are zero.

All businesses, small or large, depend on operational logistics and human activities that emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that contribute to the climate crisis. For example, the fuel used to procure a product and make customer deliveries, or the energy used to power buildings, computers, and phone systems all emit greenhouse gases. While the scale of these individual activities may be modest, they will not be zero unless a business takes additional action.

Carbon offsetting enables businesses to retain effective operations while “canceling out” those emissions that they cannot eliminate through reduction strategies alone. For any emissions a Carbon Neutral Collective member business creates, our global projects find and destroy an equal amount of refrigerant gas—some of the globe’s most potent greenhouse gases—and prevent them from leaking into the atmosphere.

A scientific review of climate change strategies, Project Drawdown, finds the control and elimination of fluorinated refrigerant gases as a top approach to reduce global warming.

Small Businesses are Well-Positioned to Make an Environmental Impact

The Carbon Neutral Collective is designed for businesses driven by an ethos of shared responsibility and environmentalism, but which may have limited resources for introducing sustainability programming.

The scale of small business activity in the United States alone is staggering: they comprise 99.9% of all businesses and employ nearly half of all Americans. The emissions linked to this economic activity is significant, but difficult to measure.

Not only does the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) not require businesses to report their carbon emissions but doing so independently can require massive resources. Large businesses can hire a sustainability director; small businesses cannot. The Carbon Neutral Collective makes it easy, affordable, and beneficial for environmentally conscious small businesses to act.

And with the world releasing more greenhouse gases each year, it’s clear the time to act is now. Current levels of greenhouse gas production are taking us drastically off track from limiting global warming to no more than 1.5° C above pre-industrial times—a consistent, clear target from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Given this urgency, leading voices are calling on small businesses to lead the way forward. As members of The Carbon Neutral Collective, members gain the tools needed to take charge of their emissions and become leaders in this important fight.

Reducing Carbon Emissions with High Quality Offsets is Good for Small Businesses

While undertaking new initiatives can be a burden for a small business, it’s worth the investment. It not only helps protect our planet, but countless studies suggest that an increased commitment to sustainability can lead to increased profits.

A report from the Carbon Disclosure Project found that companies that make climate action a priority have an 18% higher return on equity (ROE) than peers without strong climate action policies and 67% higher ROE than companies that refused to disclose their policies. And consumers echo this sentiment: according to a 2020 report from IBM and the National Retail Federation, nearly 70% of consumers in the U.S. and Canada find it important for a brand to be sustainable or eco-friendly. Not only that, but of these consumers, over 70% report that they would pay, on average, 35% more for eco-friendly brands.

As the world becomes increasingly aware of the impact of global warming, consumers are making buying choices in line with their values. The Carbon Neutral Collective empowers companies to achieve business success by making a long lasting, impactful sustainability commitment.

Join Us and Make “Business as Usual” Economically and Environmentally Sustainable

Businesses who join The Carbon Neutral Collective become members of a growing community of environmentally conscious leaders and entrepreneurs. Our members built their businesses through innovation, collaboration, and resourcefulness—and we’re thrilled to foster these talents with this new initiative.

 

Are you a small or medium sized business owner interested in The Carbon Neutral Collective? Contact us directly to learn more.

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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.