Climate

In 2019, we joined more than 500 other B Corps in announcing our commitment to hit Net Zero by 2030, 20 years ahead of the Paris Climate Accords. Like all B Corps, at Preserve we believe that businesses have a unique place of leadership in fighting climate change.

Net Zero is a journey, and a mindset - one that includes reducing our emissions as much as possible and buying certified carbon offsets for that which we can’t reduce (or in the case of our journey to Net Zero, haven’t yet taken action.)

Although Preserve had long measured, offset, and sought to reduce the emissions from that which we directly control (Scope 1 and 2 emissions), we knew that this was only a small portion of our total impact. Starting in 2020, we began working with Climate Neutral (now called ChangeClimate.org), an independent non-profit organization, to measure a more complete version of our footprint, offset it through quality carbon credits, and develop programs to reduce future emissions. We chose Change Climate.org because we find them to be highly credible and creative, and because we like that they have experience working with brands in the consumer products space. We continue to be even more impressed, as Change Climate.org is shifting toward helping brands make investments in climate initiatives for the future, not just offset.

The high-level overview of this work on our journey to Net Zero is that we need to dig deeply into impacts from making and delivering our product that are outside of our direct control. Our Scope 3 (value chain emissions) make up 99% of our impact so working with our partners and assessing our delivery of products to our Preservers is essential to our Net Zero goals. Sometimes the technology that is needed is still in development, is prohibitively expensive, or not yet widely available. This can be frustrating, and to address it we must collaborate and advocate with others who are also driving toward Net Zero.

We invite you to learn more about the steps we take to measure, offset and reduce, as part of our Climate Journey. Please scroll down for more.

MEASURE:

Preserve works with Change Climate.org to Measure our Carbon Footprint…so what does that mean?

Change Climate helps companies identify recognized business impact areas and then use established “emissions factors” to estimate the CO2 that is attributable to activities within those impact areas. Depending on the category, estimates can be based on volume of material used, on spends, or on distances. These measurements are based on averages. As you can imagine, unless you own your own vehicles (which Preserve doesn’t) or continuously monitor a partner’s operations, it can be hard to directly measure an exact footprint. An example is that we don’t measure how long a truck idles with our product on it; instead the approach is to use an estimate of how much fuel is used on average to deliver a certain weight a certain distance. Because we know that there is some uncertainty, our goal from the beginning is to overestimate areas whenever possible. This is consistent with measurement under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, and the goal is to always add more granularity to measurements as feasible.

A Carbon Footprint has 3 “scopes” and this is how we looked at ours:

Scope 1

Direct Brand Emission

Scope 1 includes emissions that come from the burning of fuel that directly releases CO2. This can include fuel burned by company vehicles and fuel burned to heat corporate buildings.

• Preserve does not own company vehicles, but purchases natural gas to heat our offices. For this scope, we collect our gas bills and information on therms used.

Scope 2

Indirect Brand Emissions

Scope 2 measures indirect emissions from purchased electricity, as well as purchased heat and steam since this energy is often generated through carbon-emitting means. While Preserve doesn't purchase steam or heat, we do purchase electricity.

• For the electricity used in Preserve’s office for lighting, cooling, and for powering our devices, we purchase 100% green electricity through a community power agreement. This step typically makes our scope 2 footprint zero.

Scope 3

Supply Chain Emissions

Scope 3 includes other indirect emissions from a company’s value chain. This is Preserve’s largest “bucket” of emissions. Because we work closely with manufacturing partners and don’t own the manufacturing facilities ourselves, the creation and delivery of our products fall into Scope 3. To measure this, we collect data on:

• Purchased goods and services – the materials we buy to make our products
• The purchase of capital goods - any machines or other durable equipment we buy
• Upstream emissions from fuel and energy – the energy used to run the machines to make our products and power the buildings in which they are located
• Upstream transportation – moving our products in the supply chain before they come to us
• Waste from operations
• Business travel – any travel undertaken by Preserve employees on behalf of Preserve
• Employee commuting - some members of the Preserve team take the train to work, while others bike, walk, drive or work from home. We gather information on office trips made, modes of transport, and distances traveled.
• Downstream transportation and distribution – delivering our products to our customers

Boundaries

Scope 3, under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, goes a bit further, but as things get further into Scope 3, the measurement of them can become difficult and “blurry.” Below are Scope 3 areas that we do NOT measure at this time and are not included in the Change Climate certification. As may be obvious, not all of them apply to Preserve.

• Upstream leased assets – not applicable
• Processing of sold products – not applicable
• Use of sold products
• End-of-life treatment of sold products
• Downstream leased assets – not applicable
• Franchises – not applicable
• Investments – not applicable

For the two on this list that do apply to Preserve, our products continue to have an impact once they are out of our hands and we currently do not measure this. The water someone heats to shave, the soap someone chooses to do dishes, whether dishwashers are run full or nearly empty – all of these have external implications for how the use of our products can contribute to CO2 emissions. We also haven’t included, for now at least, the impact of the disposal (or recycling) of our products. These are areas that we will continue to consider and address as part of the next steps in our Net Zero journey.

Our hope is that by overestimating our footprint within the boundaries laid out above and by working with partners like SeaTrees, and engaging in additional offsets for partners such as Amazon, we go beyond offsetting our minimum footprint and make a climate positive impact.

Our 2023 footprint, calculated within the boundaries, totaled 1,090 metric tonnes of carbon.

OFFSET

As detailed above, the measurement of our footprint does have some boundaries. However, within our boundary of “cradle to customer” we purchase offsets credits for our entire footprint. Offset credits, broadly, are reductions in Greenhouse Gas Emissions, or increases in carbon sequestration (trapping) that are measured in 1 metric ton increments and can be “traded” to balance emissions elsewhere.   Offset credits are typically offered as a part of “projects” and these projects, in order to ensure legitimacy, are verified by 3rd parties. For example, Change Climate requires that any projects used to offset be certified by Gold Standard, Verified Carbon Standard, Climate Action Reserve, American Carbon Registry, or European Biochar Certificate.

Preserve’s approach in choosing offsets is to prioritize projects that meet multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals and we source these offsets through several approaches.

Contributions to SeaTrees via our POPi program. 
Our contributions to SeaTrees, as part of POPi (Preserve Ocean Plastics Initiative), help to promote ocean health and also have the dual benefit of helping to offset Preserve’s footprint. We work with SeaTrees to use part of our POPi contributions to offset our footprint through the Southern Cardamom REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) project which seeks to promote biodiversity, and help create alternative livelihoods among other sustainable development goals. Our contributions to SeaTrees also go beyond certified projects and support other smaller, local, non-certified projects such as the planting of mangrove trees. For every metric ton of certified credits that Preserve purchases through SeaTrees, SeaTrees also plants 3 mango trees, which together have the potential to sequester an additional metric tonne of carbon during their lifetime.

Depending on the year, we may also look at offsets through other partners.  
For example, in our first year of working with ChangeClimate we purchased pooled offset credits with other brands with a focus on forestry and land-based projects and offset 345 tons through this approach. We chose to buy into a pool featuring these types of projects since they have the dual purpose of not only sinking carbon but also supporting livelihoods. We supported five certified projects focused on conserving forest ecosystems in Papua New Guinea, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico.

Additional Offsets – Beyond our Change Climate Footprint
On top of measuring our full footprint (which includes most of the impacts of our products), we also participate in Amazon’s Climate Pledge Friendly program, which requires us to measure individual product footprints, create product level reductions and offset. We typically purchase an additional 4-5 metric tonnes of offsets annually through this program.

REDUCE:

While offsets can deal with our current footprint, the goal in a Net Zero journey is to reduce as much as possible so that offsets are used for only that which cannot be reduced or eliminated. Change Climate’s approach is to allow flexibility within reduction plans and to push companies to increase the level of ambition in reductions year after year.

For Preserve, starting as a company that utilizes recycled materials (about a 90% lower impact than virgin materials), manufactures in the USA (lower footprint than overseas when shipping to US markets), and employs minimalist packaging, we are already in a relatively good spot. We’ve done a lot of hard work to get here. We also know that further reductions can be extremely challenging.

For Preserve’s first year of Change Climate certification, we kept our reductions simple. More recently, we have sought to tackle the energy used by our manufacturing partners, working to help them transition to greener electricity. We have also identified and implemented shipping efficiencies by working with partners such as Flock Freight. For the coming year, we are seeking small package shipping solutions that are truly credible – not just the shipper buying offsets on our behalf.

Finally, because so much of our impact comes from our material, we are committed to researching and developing even less impactful materials. While we are proud to produce with recycled polypropylene, a significant reduction compared with virgin polypropylene, we know that even lower impact materials are possible. We are developing partnerships and are engaging in R&D projects to create high quality Preserve products using these lower impact materials.

Thank you for reading about our Change Climate certification and our approach to Net Zero. We look forward to sharing more as we continue on this journey.