Get Involved Campaign - Tradewater

In this collective race to prevent catastrophic climate change, every piece is essential to the whole picture.

Learn how you can help us tackle potent greenhouse gases in a meaningful, measurable way.
Climate change affects us at every level of our human experience. Ourselves. Our families. Our businesses. Our planet.

Flooding, landslides, extreme heat, wildfires, drought. The present state looks discouraging, but we are seeing a shift beginning to happen, in attitudes, efforts, and investments in our future.

There is a clear path forward—we just need to take it, together.

When we each take smart, collaborative steps to help change the course of catastrophic climate change, we can play a meaningful, measurable role. When we act together, we can achieve maximum benefits that will impact all facets of our lives—the climate, the environment, our businesses, the places we call home, and our communities.

Maximize your climate impact

Support future efforts by engaging in smart strategies now.

Helping us scale our work is an easy, affordable way to become part of efforts today that will have the long-reaching effects a healthy future planet requires.

Your support, at any level, helps us meet our climate mitigation goals and add our piece to the puzzle.
Enter your budget or total tons to offset
$ USD
or enter
CO2e
tons for one year.
$5 allows us to permanently prevent emissions equivalent to 314 pounds of coal being burned.
$25 allows us to permanently prevent emissions equivalent to over 60 trash bags of waste being landfilled.
$50 allows us to permanently prevent emissions equivalent to carbon removed by over 3 acres of forest.
Contact us at info@tradewater.us today to learn more.

Future-smart strategies start now​

Tradewater’s work is taking effect now, doing the essential work of destroying ozone-depleting gases, which will give other important climate solutions the time they need to fully materialize.

These gases, non-CO2 gases like methane, refrigerants, and halons, are among the most potent greenhouse gases in existence; some are over 10,000 times more potent than CO2. They are greatly accelerating climate change in the short-term and, once they are leaked, they cannot ever be removed from the atmosphere. To date, we have prevented over 6.9 million tons of CO2e from entering our atmosphere, and identified a global pathway to achieve 22 million tons of impact over the next few years.

With your help, we can rapidly scale these efforts and give our planet a fighting chance.

A comprehensive approach lays a strong foundation

Support future efforts by engaging in smart strategies now.

Helping us scale our work to permanently prevent non-CO2 gases from entering our atmosphere is an easy, affordable way to participate in immediate climate impact that will have the long-reaching effects a healthy future planet requires.

Your support, at any level, helps us meet our climate mitigation goals and add our critical piece to the puzzle.
Contact us at info@tradewater.us today to learn more.

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.