Carbon neutral ecommerce with EcoCart
Plus maybe we should recycle less 🧐
Greetings everyone,
This week I interviewed EcoCart founder and CEO Dane Baker. Dane and his team are building the future of carbon neutral ecommerce by enabling carbon offset purchases at checkout. From EcoCart’s website, carbon offsets “are a practical and effective way to reduce the effects of climate change by funding renewable energy, forestry, or clean water projects.” TLDR shipping anything to your door releases GHG emissions, and EcoCart facilitates the mitigation of those emissions. The best part is carbon neutral shipments come at NO COST to the consumer with EcoCart’s new Chrome extension.
I also provide an intro to plastics recycling and offer thoughts on best practices (hint: avoid plastic at all costs). Lastly, I added a new section — climate meme of the week.
Be well and enjoy the weekend 🔮
Brendan
Carbon neutral ecommerce with EcoCart founder Dane Baker 🎙️
What led you to start EcoCart?
My partner and I were involved with a prior business. It was an online peer-to-peer rental marketplace business. You can think of it like Airbnb, except instead of renting someone’s home, you can rent their surfboard, snowboard, drone, bike, etc. We built the business because we felt that renting, in stark contrast to consumption, was a far more significant net benefit for the environment, especially with high-plastic items like kayaks. After a while, it just became incredibly complicated and expensive to be a sustainable brand.
What’s your goal for the company?
Our mission here at EcoCart is to make the fight against climate change easy, affordable, and accessible so that everyone can do their part. And that’s the key: everyone. We focus on the convenience part by reducing the friction for both businesses and consumers to opt-in and participate in this community. We thought that was the best way to grow and make a significant impact.
Before we talk about your new product, how does the Shopify app work today?
EcoCart offers a Shopify app that any merchant can install in their store that enables customers to opt into carbon neutral orders at checkout. Just as each order has a unique carbon footprint, the price of each offset is also unique. We look at a few factors in Shopify’s backend with each order, such as the shipping distance, package weight, product type, and run them through our algorithm to compute a dollar amount for the customer to opt into. Generally speaking, it’s under a dollar, so it’s incredibly affordable. We then direct the money towards certified carbon offset projects like planting trees and building wind farms.
EcoCart just announced a new Chrome extension product. How does it differ from the Shopify-based product?
It’s the same model — we provide consumers the option to opt-in to a carbon neutral order. The difference with this consumer-facing Chrome extension is that all carbon neutral orders are entirely free to the consumer. So no longer do they have to pay $0.75 or whatever it was previously. Now they get their order carbon neutral at no cost to them whatsoever. You can kind of think of it as Honey but for sustainable shopping. When a purchase is converted on an affiliate website, EcoCart gets a small commission, which we use to buy carbon offsets. We make the order carbon neutral and pass along EcoPoints to the consumer, which they can redeem for Earth-saving rewards like planting trees, giving clean water to families, or if they want, as Amazon gift cards.
Can you talk a bit about the carbon offset projects you buy credits from?
All of the projects that we look at are certified by the six major carbon standards. After that, we hand-select projects that fit our criteria and are the most impactful. Right now, we work with three projects, which is intentional because we want to be incredibly selective. When you buy a carbon offset, you’re buying one ton of carbon reduction from the environment. At their core, that’s what all these projects do. But the projects that are really special to us are the ones that have an element of social good as well. This could be protecting the habitat of an endangered species or creating local jobs in a developing nation. In addition to that, we want to be as geographically diverse as we can because supply chains are incredibly spread out around the world, and we want to be as close to the source as possible.
Are consumers able to specify their preference for which projects to select?
We elected not to include this feature in our first Shopify-based product. The checkout flow is a sensitive part of any ecommerce business. We wanted to reduce the friction at checkout by giving the customer fewer options. People can get confused when they have too many options, and cart abandonment can go up. However, with the new Chrome extension product, the consumer has full control of where the money goes.
How challenging is it to estimate the carbon footprint of each product?
At its core, it is an estimation. We cannot possibly know every aspect of that product and how it gets to the customer’s doorstep. However, we think it is the most accurate estimation that we can come up with. Before launching the product, we spent months coming up with a robust back-end database of product types and associated emissions. We started with the Higg Index and then layered in industry-specific lifecycle analyses. We also spoke with climatology PhDs. Long term, the more customers that we have, the more accurate our database gets.
Check out EcoCart on Product Hunt, and be sure to add the extension to your browser so you can shop sustainably today!
Climate meme of the week 🤦
Maybe we should recycle less 🧐
I have no shame acknowledging that this title is clickbait. BUT, if you read on, you will learn why it might just make sense to recycle less…
The intimate history of recycling and the petrochemical industry
The U.S. recycling system is trash, and perhaps that’s not an accident. Synthetic plastic (aka most plastic) is created by refining crude oil, natural gas, or coal. Unsurprisingly, plastic is an important business line for fossil fuel companies. Virtually all oil & gas companies either supply raw materials to chemical companies (like Dow) or produce their own plastic. As early as the 1970s, petrochemical businesses poured millions of dollars into recycling advocacy campaigns (example ‘90s commercial here at 62:46) while simultaneously doubting recycling's viability. Per NPR, former plastics officials stated, “the industry promoted recycling as a way to beat back a growing tide of antipathy toward plastic.” Fast forward to today, plastic remains an important growth area for fossil fuel companies, especially in the wake of increased pressure on their core business. Petrochemical businesses invested more than $200 billion into plastic and other chemical projects in the U.S. in the last decade alone, per the American Chemistry Council. One such example of this investment push is Shell’s forthcoming $6 billion ethane cracking facility in Pennsylvania. Altogether, the International Energy Agency estimates that petrochemicals will account for roughly half of oil demand by 2050.
Why recycling plastic is challenging
The four main challenges when it comes to plastics recycling are:
Contamination: Dirty containers often contaminate otherwise clean recyclables during transportation and processing
Perverse economics: It’s cheaper to produce new plastic than to recycle existing plastic
Plastics “innovation”: Petrochemical companies continue to produce new forms of plastic that existing recycling infrastructure cannot process
Under-developed domestic infrastructure: The U.S. has historically underinvested in its recycling infrastructure
Let’s double-click on the last point. In the 1990s, the U.S. began offshoring its poorest quality recyclables to China. As recently as 2016, the U.S. exported roughly half of its yearly plastic generated (16 million tons) to China. With China handling a significant portion of its annual waste, the United States avoided investment in its domestic recycling capabilities over the past three decades. You probably know where this is going, but in 2018, China announced more stringent guidelines for its waste imports, effectively forcing the U.S. to seek alternative buyers. Although aggregate exports have dropped dramatically since the China ban, the U.S. now exports its plastic recycling to countries with lax regulations (e.g., Senegal, Turkey, Ecuador), where the vast majority is being dumped into bodies of water or incinerated.
Where do we stand today?
As of 2017, the United States is generating ~35 million tons of plastic per year, of which only 8% is recycled. This data is from before the China ban, making me think that the percentage is probably even lower now, especially as total exports have fallen dramatically. The implication is that the vast majority of plastic waste ends up in a landfill, where it will slowly decompose, releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and microplastics into the local environment. The following chart shows the evolution of plastics waste management in the U.S. over the past six decades.
Solutions for the governments and businesses
Domestic infrastructure investment – Recycling facilities compete for local dollars (i.e., no federal budget), meaning they directly compete with education, police, housing, etc. for $. Creating a robust secondary market for recyclables in the U.S. through regulation is an efficient way to drive demand, which can help correct the perverse economic situation whereby new plastic is cheaper than recycled plastic
“Reuse” not “recycling” – We should rebuild our economy to emphasize reuse, not recycling. Muuse founder Brian Reilly outlined what that might look like in the last issue of The Cool Down
Packaging innovation – Startups are leading the charge in the creation of truly sustainable packaging. If we are going to have single-use packaging, it needs to be non-toxic and produced in harmony with the planet. This mushroom packaging and Paperseal are good examples
Solutions for you and me
When in doubt, throw it out – Overtaxing the already strained recycling system is counter-productive
De-contaminate recyclables – Clean your containers and bottles before placing them in the recycling bin
Avoid single-use plastic like the plague – Easier said than done but start with common purchases like household items and groceries
Buy groceries from co-ops, CSAs, or the bulk section – Joining a food co-op or CSA is a great way to support local farms and minimize food packaging waste. Another great option is to shop at a zero-waste grocery store like Precycle or Zero. You can also check out this database of low-waste grocery stores by state
Invest in reusable produce bags – Say farewell to those plastic bags you put your produce in at the grocery store (hint: just because they are green doesn’t mean they’re good for 🌏). Instead, invest in these
Vote for people who aren’t bankrolled by the plastics industry
Additional sources: Columbia, Yale, The Guardian
Thanks for reading 🙏 If you have any feedback or want me to research a particular topic, please leave a comment below or send me a note. Also, if you’re not a subscriber yet, you know what to do 👇