Pennies for the planet - Tradewater

Pennies for the Planet

Meaningful, accessible climate action for your company—and your customers

The opportunity

Brands that are looking to take meaningful climate action can empower their customers and broader value chain to play a significant role in that journey by offering engagement opportunities that are both easy to understand and accessible. Joining Tradewater’s Pennies for the Planet program is the perfect place to start.

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HOW IT WORKS

Tradewater’s Pennies for the Planet concept aims to aggregate nominal amounts across interactions with your customers or supply chains to scale major impact that everyone can play a role in—without any one person or organization having to bear the cost.

Determine the desired impact:
Assign a nominal amount to a transaction, product, or any customer or partner interaction. By adding “pennies” that will be aggregated for climate impact to moments with your customers and partners, you signal to them your commitment to taking climate action and invite them to act with you in a simple, yet meaningful, way.

Support new, meaningful climate impacts:
Funds can be aggregated via an API or a monthly reconciliation process and then, through Tradewater, are applied to emergency brake climate solutions that curb climate change today and buy us time to implement necessary decarbonization strategies.

Spread the word:
Work with Tradewater and your customers to celebrate our collective impact through simple interactions with your brand.

The benefits

To your company

This partnership will uniquely leverage your company’s position to create a massive funding stream for climate action without a financial burden to you OR your customers while allowing them to partner with you on this journey. This aggregation model that invites your customers and partners on this journey will create incredible reputational and brand value and position your company as a leader in the fight against climate change. You can set your brand apart by creating a unique climate fund that activates climate solutions above and beyond the sustainability commitments your organization has already made. This commitment to our planet can also lead to further engagement from employees and, if implemented across a supply chain, gives your partners a climate story they can be proud of.

To your customers

When faced with a choice of who to do business with, your customers will be confident that if they choose your company, they can play a meaningful role in the global movement to save our planet with minimal financial burden. As such, this partnership will help you attract, retain, and support a customer base whose values align with your commitment to the environment and engage these communities as you work toward meeting your collective climate goals.

To our planet

The Pennies for the Planet program contributes directly to an ongoing climate fund that helps scale critical emergency brake climate solutions. The fund supports the permanent prevention of emissions from CO2e greenhouse gases that are often overlooked but are a significant cause of catastrophic climate change.
Tradewater is a mission-based B-Corp strategically focused on scaling these solutions globally. Through our partnerships with companies like yours, we have prevented over 6.9 million tons of CO2e emissions from entering our atmosphere to date. We are now on a path to prevent 3 million tons of CO2e annually—and with your partnership, we can make this critical work possible.

To learn more about this opportunity, please contact the Tradewater team at info@tradewater.us

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.