By including the cost of offsetting CO₂ emissions into the price of your product, you are enabling consumers to take responsibility for the carbon in their supply chain. It is possible that one day all products and services will have the cost of carbon built in. By pioneering this approach you can boost your competitiveness.

Adding an appropriate carbon payment

First you need to work out how much you will offset per product/service sold. There are three main approaches to choose from:

1. Emissions associated with the life-cycle of your product

In some cases, companies have already researched the life-cycle CO₂ emissions associated with each unit of their product or service, including the raw materials, manufacture, use and disposal. In this case you simply add a payment to offset this amount of CO₂ per unit sold.

If you would like to use this approach, we recommend you use a carbon footprint service such as The Carbon Trust to work out the emissions associated with your product.

2. Emissions associated with the use of your product

Companies can offer offsets for emissions associated with an element of the life-cycle of a product or service, such as the mileage of a car or electricity use of an appliance. In most cases you can use the online business offset tool to work out an appropriate amount to offset per unit sold, using estimated customer usage.

3. Nominal offset with the purchase of your product

In some cases, companies decide to offset an amount of CO₂ per product, but not relate these directly to the full emissions of the product. For example, you could work out an offset amount per product based on the following:

• Contribute a % of the product price to offset funds.
• Contribute a nominal amount to offset for each product purchased – e.g. 1 tonne per unit.
• For those working in the service industries where your product may be a relatively low carbon one, you might like to offset your share of the carbon for every £1 in the economy.

Product/Services Case Studies

Herman Miller Ltd started working with us by offsetting the carbon emissions from their staff flights. They then wished to take this further and so commissioned a footprint analysis to calculate the emissions from the production of their four major chair product lines, the Aeron, Mirra, Celle and Caper chairs by carbon footprinting company Best Foot Forward. As a result, Herman Miller is now able to offset all carbon emissions from the manufacturing and delivery of these chairs in Europe.

All-rooms.com is an online hotel booking service. For each reservation made the company, at no cost to the customer, makes a contribution of £2 towards ClimateCare’s offsetting projects.

Aura Light’s production sites have agreed to offset a set amount per light source produced through ClimateCare’s portfolio. This figure represents the average electricity and gas used in production and the average delivery from their production facility to customers in Sweden and Germany. The approximate figures were calculated by Aura Light.


For more information, contact business@climatecare.org or call +44 (1865) 591000.