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The Ins and Outs of Carbon Offsets

Kelsey Abbott

To be a carbon-neutral company, you must balance the amount of CO2 your business emits (your carbon footprint) with equal reductions in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. You can shrink your footprint significantly by reducing your greenhouse gas emissions. But a skinny carbon footprint won't necessarily make your business carbon neutral. To do that, you'll need to offset your remaining greenhouse gas emissions. We'll show you how:

How Carbon Offsets Work

A carbon offset represents the reduction of a specific amount of greenhouse gases. By purchasing carbon offsets, you help finance the development of clean and renewable energy projects such as wind turbines, solar arrays, methane projects for family farms and landfill gas capture systems. Your purchase adds more clean energy to the power grid, thus reducing the demand for electricity from fossil fuels.

Where to Buy Carbon Offsets

Native Energy offers business-specific offsets including offsets for travel companies, events and business travel. With Native Energy you can choose to support a specific project, such as the Wanner Family Dairy Farm Methane Project. Native Energy also offers renewable energy credits, which are pretty much the same as buying green power from your utility company. You can select 100% wind power, 100% methane power or 50% wind/50% methane. Offsetting a flight from JFK to LAX would cost $24.

Carbonfund, which prides itself on offering the lowest prices, sells offsets to support projects in renewable energy, energy efficiency and reforestation. These offsets go for $5.50 per ton. Offsets for the same flight would cost $4.92.

These are just two of the more than 50 carbon offset retailers in today's market. So with so many offset options, how do you know if one is better than the other? Good carbon offsets should be verified or certified by a third party, meaning that they comply with the Gold Standard, the Voluntary Carbon Standard 2007 or the standards set by Green-e Climate.

Offsets sold by both Carbonfund and Native Energy are verified by The Gold Standard and VCS 2007. Meanwhile, Green-e Climate in February became the first U.S. certifier of consumer carbon offsets. To date, Green-e Climate has only certified carbon offsets from four retailers: 3Degrees, Bonneville Environmental Foundation, Community Energy and Renewable Choice.

Reassess Your Carbon Neutrality

Once your business goes carbon neutral, you'll want to stay there. Reassess your carbon footprint annually. Unless your business operations change drastically, you'll be able to do this on your own with the help of a spreadsheet and a few online carbon footprint calculators. Your emissions are likely to fluctuate from year to year as technology evolves and employees become more aware of the impact of their activities. As the carbon offset market grows, emissions will likely change, too.

How do you stay on top of these changes? Consider forming a "green team." Employee volunteers can monitor your company's carbon footprint, look for ways to continually reduce your greenhouse gas emissions and assess your offset purchases to make sure they are the most appropriate choices for your company.