How to offset your order
To offset the carbon footprint of your order, simply make sure the offset option is selected in your basket. You can do this by visiting the basket icon in the top right corner of the website, clicking ‘view basket’ and scrolling down to the summary.
This adds a small charge to your order, purchasing an amount of carbon removal equivalent to your basket’s carbon footprint estimate.
The contribution goes to supporting four of the world’s leading frontier carbon removal projects, which you can read about below.
To show our support in making high-quality carbon removal accessible - we are 1:1 matching contributions made by our early customers, meaning you get your offset at 50% off!
Learn more about how we estimate the carbon footprint of our products here.
How Sourceful spends your contribution
100% of each contribution goes directly to supporting our project partners; Sourceful takes 0% commission on the offset. We are committed to helping frontier carbon offset projects scale, which means getting as many businesses to work with high-quality projects as we can.
Some of the projects below are enabled through our partnership with Patch - a leading carbon removal marketplace.
For more information about Patch, visit patch.io
The offset projects
The portfolio at Sourceful is made up of four of the world’s leading permanent carbon removal projects. Each removes CO2 directly from the atmosphere, storing it for 800+ years.
Heirloom
Using natural carbonate minerals to capture and store carbon from the air.
Heirloom marries the natural properties of abundant carbonate minerals with a passive air contactor in a Direct Air Capture system to remove CO2 permanently from the air. These minerals are highly reactive with CO2 at ambient temperature and pressure. They're placed in the air contactor and exposed to ambient air. The CO2 is then extracted, while the mineral is returned to the air contactor to absorb CO2 again. The resulting "looping" process is an affordable, sustainable, low-extraction method to permanently remove CO2 from our atmosphere at scale.
Charm Industrial
Plant-captured carbon is turned into bio-oil and stored safely underground.
Charm Industrial is leveraging the natural ability of plants to remove carbon dioxide. However, they are hacking the process to ensure it is permanently stored and not re-released. They convert waste biomass (i.e. dead plant matter) into fast pyrolysis bio-oil and inject it deep underground, where it will be safely stored for thousands of years.
greenSand
Using the mineral olivine to remove carbon through natural weathering.
greenSand focus on removing CO2 by leveraging a natural weathering process. They utilise the properties of a common mineral called Olivine. The mineral is ground into gravel or sand and used in roads, footpaths and railway lines. The mineral reacts with rain which contains CO2, producing bicarbonate solutions that ultimately lead to the safe storage of carbon in limestone on the seafloor. The reaction is one-sided, and the CO2 is permanently fixed.
Running Tide
Removing carbon by growing and then sinking kelp in the open ocean.
Kelp removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, growing at a pace 20x faster than trees. Running Tide are deploying kelp seed units into the open ocean where once Kelp has matured, it is sunk into the deep sea, where low oxygen concentrations prevent carbon from escaping.
Our portfolio is representative of a diverse set of technologies, covering mineralisation, direct air capture, ocean kelp and biomass. By combining them into one basket, you can support the scaling of a range of technologies, as well as manage the cost of each into a more balanced profile.
How Sourceful selected the projects
There’s international consensus that carbon removal is required for us to hit the targets needed to combat climate change (IPCC SR15, 2018. Also echoed in IPCC, 2021 AR6). However, carbon removal is a relatively young industry, where industry-standard verification doesn’t yet exist for many of the technologies. As a result, to assess our project partners, we adopted a framework based on the Oxford Offsetting Principles, launched in 2020, and the CarbonPlan carbon removal framework. These criteria ensure each project contributes effectively to the fight against climate change, beyond traditional offsets.
We identified five key criteria to assess each project:
Permanence - meaning the length of time for which the carbon is safely stored. We are looking for at least 1000 years.
Additionality - meaning they represent a carbon removal that otherwise would not have taken place. We are looking for high confidence in additionality.
Net Negativity - meaning the ratio between emissions required to deliver the carbon removal and the carbon removal itself. We are looking for a balanced emissions profile.
Path to Affordability - meaning a demonstrable path to achieve a significant reduction in £/ton as a result of our contribution. And to increase future uptake. We are looking for projects with a clear path to significant price reduction.
We use a combination of publicly available information (e.g. the independent assessment conducted by Carbonplan), direct engagement with each project team and the Patch team, and support from our external academic advisers.
For more details on project assessment, contact our team at climate@sourceful.com.
Does Sourceful offer traditional offsets?
No, we don’t. Traditional offsets, although low cost, are highly unlikely to scale to the required level needed to address the climate crisis.
The reasons for this are many, but two of the major issues are low permanence (the CO2 is avoided or removed only for a short period of time before it is re-emitted) and lack of additionality (the activity you are funding would have happened anyway).
It’s abundantly clear that the planet needs permanent carbon removal and technology that can take CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it for over 1000 years (IPCC SR15, 2018).
This is why we work with permanent carbon removal projects.
Can I use Sourceful to offset my organisation’s footprint?
Yes! You can support these four frontier projects through Sourceful Climate. Find out more here.
Alternatively, if you’re ready to make a commitment you can contact our sustainability team at climate@sourceful.com.
Can I contribute to specific projects as opposed to all four?
No, we don’t currently offer the ability to choose. There’s good reason for why supporting all four projects is beneficial, specifically:
The cost of each project differs because they’re at different stages of maturity. By having a portfolio, we can manage costs and flatten the playing field for the different technologies
There’s no single solution that will scale to remove enough CO2 from the atmosphere alone. We need to fund different technologies to ensure we don’t put all our eggs in one basket.
If emissions of multiple greenhouse gases are causing the climate crisis, why do Sourceful focus only on removing CO2 from the atmosphere?
After measuring long-term global warming impacts, it’s clear that carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas emitted by human activity (Edenhofer, Ottmar, et al., 2016). CO2 has a long life, and its impact can last for centuries – or even millennia (Archer, David, et al. 2009).
Other greenhouse gases (methane, nitrous oxide, and hydrofluorocarbons) have a much shorter atmospheric life of between 10-100 years. The concentration of CO2 is much higher than that of other gases. For example, while CO2 is at 415ppm (January 2021), methane is at 2ppm.
If you’re a project working on mitigating the impacts of other greenhouse gas emissions, we'd love to hear from you.
Contact us at climate@sourceful.com.