Creating a carbon positive world, one Shopify purchase at a time

We want to give a shout-out to our friends at Terra Neutra and their hot new Shopify app, ClearSky.

Terra Neutra was created to help people make informed choices about how to proactively decrease their carbon footprint and lead more sustainable lives. Their mission is to create a more carbon positive world by creating tools to enable businesses and consumers to manage their carbon footprint.

Last year, on Earth Day, we announced that Rocket was certified Climate Neutral thanks to purchasing a bunch of offsets through Terra Neutra for an initiative in Darfur to provide folks there with low-smoke cookstoves that cut down on pollution. And this Earth Day, our friends at Dept announced they also partnered up with Climate Neutral and Terra Neutra to become carbon neutral thanks to their support for the Hifadhi Livelihoods project, which protects 18,000 hectares of Kenyan forest each year by preventing rural households from using wood to fuel their homes.

As you can see, we’re big fans of the Terra Neutra crew. Which is why we were thrilled to help them build out a proof of concept for the ClearSky app.

ClearSky is designed to be used in Shopify stores as a way of offsetting a purchased product’s carbon footprint, in addition to the carbon footprint of its delivery which Shopify already enables shoppers to offset. Premium recycled fashion label, BEEN London, is the first brand to integrate the app into its Shopify store.

Vendors that use Shopify can integrate the ClearSky app into the purchase cycle so as to offer customers an option for offsetting the carbon footprint of their chosen item. Terra Neutra’s offsetting project portfolio provides the infrastructure for turning the product into a carbon neutral purchase.

ClearSky calculates the carbon footprint of products in Shopify stores using Terra Neutra’s API, which is linked to a peer-reviewed, environmentally extended, input-output Life Cycle Assessment database. Using this information, ClearSky calculates the cost to offset the carbon footprint of products within a shopping cart, giving consumers the option of whether or not to continue with offsetting the products.

For store owners who use the independent Life Cycle Assessment to calculate the carbon footprint of their product catalogue, ClearSky provides an option to input a custom carbon footprint value against each product. Store owners can also use the app to cover product offset costs themselves and flag this benefit in the shopping cart.

With over 44 million customers purchasing from Shopify merchants in 2020, there is huge potential for the ClearSky app to help many store owners and consumers have a direct impact on creating a more carbon positive world. We are thrilled to support our friends at Terra Neutra in this ambitious mission and hope we can find even more apps to build together in the future.