Understanding Carbon Offsetting: Reversing the Damage We've Done
Executive Mat Service
Bringing safety, health, and environmental solutions to Canadian businesses.
Did this happen to you before? You bought linen clothes for the kitchen 8 months ago, just to feel better about your environmental choices, but you haven’t washed them for a long time because you’re still using your paper towels. Choosing the right thing always comes with responsibility. Having washable clothes but still using paper towels won’t make you an environmentally aware consumer. The same principle applies to companies.
As a practical way to offset carbon emissions, there are methods to reduce emissions and companies that sell offsetting projects. But what is carbon offsetting? Once you have reduced your carbon emissions as much as practically possible, the next step involves neutralizing the remaining emissions. This is done through the purchase of Verified Emission Reductions (VERs). VERs are carbon offsets certified by third-party organizations to ensure they provide genuine, measurable environmental benefits. These offsets support projects that either avoid emissions (like landfill methane avoidance) or capture carbon directly from the atmosphere (such as reforestation). So, for the emissions we cannot eliminate, these offsets ensure that our operations achieve true carbon neutrality today, rather than in some distant future.
Prioritizing Actions: An Analogy
Knowing the stage at which offsetting should occur is important. Let’s say you decided to cut your sugar intake. How would you proceed? Which makes more sense, having your coffee with no sugar on day one or starting to use diabetes shots before quitting sugar?
The Pressure on Companies
We see green tags on some items at retail stores, and most company websites have a sustainability section. Other organizations feel the need to take action, which is how it should be. However, there is a difference between taking action and panicking leading to wrong and insufficient decisions. Pushing the marketing department to design more green tags won’t make you a carbon net-zero company. It is important to choose your path in the Carbon Net Zero journey wisely.
?A lazy research’s insights
Either there is a lack of guidance from government services or international organizations, or companies are still not aware of the urgency. Deciding to reduce the carbon footprint and aiming for carbon net zero is not easy, and unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. Let’s perform a little research on Google. As Google completes my searches, I understand what kind of questions our tired friend Google receives. The top five findings usually tell which page receives more visitors and what kind of content keeps the visitor longer. This gives the lazy researcher a good number of ideas on a certain topic.
I started my research with “How to offset carbon footprint?”, a very basic question even people who have no idea about carbon emissions would understand what we are trying to find out. The first content that pops up is from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). I don’t know why WWF kept its content so simple and short, but the whole page is 276 words, which is less than one-third of the article you are reading right now. They suggest avoiding driving when you can cycle or walk, reducing energy consumption, switching to sustainable energy sources, and, as the last step, offsetting your carbon emissions.
As a reader, I’d expect WWF’s page to give some suggestions about offsetting carbon emissions or provide an overview. But they only mention tree planting, even though there are numerous ways to do it. You need to choose from a portfolio of a company that offers carbon-offsetting services. But there are good offsetting methods and bad ones. Each offsetting method comes with its limitations and opportunities.
What about other findings that popped up on my Google search page? There is content from The Guardian’s website published in 2011. The website gives you a heads-up saying the article is 12 years old, hinting that there must be many updates since then and the reader should double-check the information. Even this little research shows limited content when it comes to updated news on carbon emissions and environmental trends. Think about it: since 2011, nobody wrote an article on carbon offsetting that is more valuable than The Guardian’s, or internet users didn’t pay enough attention to content about carbon offsetting.
Offsetting Strategies
If we create a scenario in which you are a mid-sized boutique that started to reduce your emissions by switching to greener options. Your delivery truck is now an electric vehicle, and you are not printing any catalogs. What about offsetting? What are your options? What are the costs of these activities, and what is the return?
Forestation
When you think by yourself without any leadership or mentorship on the issue, you’ll likely lean towards reforestation. These projects involve planting trees where a forest has been cleared. But trees take many years to reach maturity. During their early years as saplings, trees can only absorb a limited amount of carbon from the atmosphere, meaning that tree planting projects usually do not deliver actual emission reductions for many years – possibly decades – after the trees are planted. Some project developers will plant a would store over its lifespan if it lived to maturity. But at the end of the day, there is no problem for your company to market your carbon net-zero efforts. You can simply market yourself on your channels as having done great work by funding a forestation activity. But where are you really, and how sincere are you? (David Suzuki Foundation, 2009)
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Sometimes the order is not even like that. Instead of reducing emissions as much as possible, companies start buying offsets and promoting them on marketing channels. They rush to publish statements or print new catalogs announcing how many trees they planted. Forestation could be a great birthday gift for your best friend but wouldn’t be enough for an organization whose consumption exceeds hundreds of kilograms of carbon emissions daily. Getting your burger bunless is a nice step towards a healthier diet, but diet coke won’t save you in the long term.
Renewable Energy
Building renewable energy plants as an offsetting method also comes with its problems. Imagine you are trying to eat healthier by incorporating more fruits and vegetables into your diet. You decide to add a lot of spinach and broccoli to your meals because they are nutritious and good for you. However, instead of reducing your consumption of junk food, you continue eating the same amount of chips and candy as before. In this scenario, even though you are eating more healthy food, the overall impact on your diet is not as positive as it could be because you are not reducing the unhealthy food. Similarly, when growing economies expand their renewable energy sources, they are adding to their energy mix without reducing their reliance on fossil fuels.
Hoping for Help from Future Technologies
There are many ways to postpone decisions and activities. Hoping for help from future technologies is another way of keeping yourself in toxic positivity. Instead of finding ways to improve our current situation, we hope things will get better even if we do nothing. We have already crossed that line, and there is no chance for us to wait or dislike the current solutions we have. Whatever way we have to offset the damage we have done to the planet, we must use the current techniques to mitigate the damage. We can’t rely on something we are not witnessing yet.
What Other Companies Are Doing?
At Executive Mat Service, where we specialize in janitorial supplies and floor mats:
Each of these innovations has been crucial in helping our clients reduce their Scope 3 emissions. Rather than merely paying for offsets, implementing projects that actively reduce current carbon emissions is a more effective long-term strategy for achieving carbon net zero.
David Suzuki Foundation. (2009). Purchasing carbon offsets: A guide for Canadians. https://davidsuzuki.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/purchasing-carbon-offsets-guide-for-canadians-2023.pdf
Neslihan Arslan
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