Above the counters at Pret a Manger stores in London, wedged between the menu boards, signs urge customers to bring a reusable cup to “save 50p” and “save the world”. In that order, notably.

It has stuck with me. Not so much because ‘save the world with your reusable cup’ is outlandish hyperbole, but rather because it’s almost — well — landish. It’s commonplace.

We’re being inundated with these eco-imperatives on a daily basis. Turn off the lights. Don’t keep the tap running. Swap to LEDs. All ostensibly to ‘save the world’, and all, ostensibly, from credible sources: we hear them in classrooms, from governments, from businesses, and (incessantly) from your favourite vegan’s Instagram story.

Sadly, we’ve been lied to. And it’s a lie told in two parts:

1. These small actions can save the world (they won’t. In fact they can’t)

2. Saving the world is your responsibility (not in the way you’ve been told)

According to Pret, saving the world has never been easier

Personal carbon footprints: a red herring

To make sense of all this we only need to look at the origin of a single concept: carbon footprints. 

A carbon footprint is the total greenhouse gas emissions caused by an individual, event, organisation, service, place or product, expressed as a carbon dioxide equivalent.

Since practically everything requires energy, and since we primarily burn fossil fuels for energy1, all things have a carbon footprint. Greener options, e.g. energy-efficient lightbulbs, cause less CO₂ emissions than their power-hungry alternatives and thus have smaller footprints. That’s the gist.

People care, and as environmental awareness has grown over the past few decades, they’ve steadily come to care more. This has led to an increased focus on carbon footprints as a sort of bellwether for personal responsibility. It influences what food we eat, what type of car we buy, and indeed how we live our lives. The goal: minimise your footprint.

This is where it gets dark. In a twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan, it turns out the concept of carbon footprints was popularised in a marketing campaign by BP back in 2004. That’s British Petroleum, one of the largest oil companies in the world. 

The real villain 

Their reason for doing so is as obvious in hindsight as it was pernicious in execution. The fossil fuel industry and their marketing shills spawned the idea of personal — individual — responsibility, in order to shine the light away from themselves.

They had to. Leaked reports show that their own scientists realised that CO₂ could heat up the globe and destabilise the biosphere as far back as the 1970s. And it worked a treat: the carbon footprint campaign took off and served as yet another tool that helped buy the fossil fuel industry decades of reduced scrutiny. Crucial decades.

All the while, like rotten fruit sprouting from poisoned soil, well-meaning people devised eco-imperatives that, unbeknownst to them, were the offshoots of a deliberate gaslighting campaign. Turn off the lights, turn off the tap… turn off your mind. These tenets designed to ‘save the world’, have paradoxically worked to instead perpetuate a status quo that’s destabilising it for profit.

While we’ve been busy running around naming and shaming our neighbours, fossil fuel companies have gone about business as usual.

But why can’t a lot of small actions save the world? The hard truth: 70% of all global emissions come from just 100 companies, practically all of them energy companies. As you may have guessed, BP is on the list. 

Your personal carbon footprint is essentially a function of your exposure to these companies — and as long as you live within the confines of modern society, that exposure is constant. Sustainable choices are little more than trimming around the edges, the same way removing a cherry from atop a cupcake is a caloric restriction.

As it turns out, this was all in fact proven to us during the coronavirus pandemic: an experiment of global proportions wherein literally billions of people stayed at home while consuming less, travelling less, doing less. What happened to global emissions in 2020? They fell a measly 6%. 

NYC during lockdown; inadvertently debunking personal responsibility (Photo by Paulo Silva)

Do more good, not less bad

This may all read as if your actions are irrelevant, and that you’re absolved of responsibility. The opposite is in fact true. If you and I are seriously going to keep the world habitable, we both have to do more, not less. More than what is easy, and definitely more than what is comfortable.

To be effective, we have to rid ourselves not only of our obsession with personal carbon footprints, but also the larger mindset that it helped percolate. The answer doesn’t lie in minimising the bad we do. It lies in finding ways to count for more than yourself. In catalysing systemic change. In being a force of disproportional good. 

Here are a few ways to do just that:

1. Educate yourself and others

A well-functioning society depends on a “well-informed citizenry”. Educating ourselves (and others) on the challenges we face is both our responsibility as citizens, and a fundamental prerequisite for taking action. If you have friends that prefer their education via animated videos starring cute ducks, you could consider sending them this for starters.

2. Campaign

There is an incredible statistic that encapsulates the disproportionate power you can have as an individual: only 3.5% of a population must actively protest an issue to incite serious political change. So make as much noise as you can. Join peaceful protests. Write to your representatives. Confront elected officials in public forums. Hold companies to account for their actions and policies.

3. Vote

It definitely sounds trite, but there is no doubt that voting is one of the most effective things an individual can do proactively create change. Vote only for politicians and parties that take a hard stance against the fossil fuel lobby. Odds are they’ll have less industry backing as a result, so if you have the means to donate, do that too.

4. Divest from fossil fuels

If you’re privileged enough to have investments and a pension, make sure none of your money is invested in, or financing new, fossil fuel projects. A global divestment campaign is already barring $40 trillion in funds from being allocated to fossil fuels — it’s one of our most effective tools in recomposing the global energy system.

5. Have an outsized positive impact through consumption

You should expect more of the companies you buy from. That’s because it’s no longer complicated or expensive to sell products that are net positive — services like Verdn make it effortless.

To illustrate, consider a company that decides to offset the delivery of their products. Let’s say the industry-standard is around 2.5 kgCO₂ per delivery.2

In line with the argument of this piece, we believe that this initiative is ineffective at best, and that it induces harmful complacency at worst. There is simply a better, more holistic (and also more radical) way:

Take Gumbies, one of our customers. Gumbies plant as many as 10 mangrove trees whenever they sell a pair of flip-flops. Given mangroves’ ferocious appetite for carbon, this means that each pair of flip-flops will remove 120 kgCO₂ per year on average. That’s ∼50x more than if they just offset delivery.3 But it goes further. Mangroves have a 25-year growth cycle. In that time, the same single pair of flip flops can remove a staggering 3 tonnes of CO₂. That’s equivalent to 1,200 product deliveries, or 25,000 km driven in a new car. 

Finally, if it needed saying, we should all keep doing the small stuff. Consume less, fly less, waste less. Support local businesses, and buy local produce. Eat less meat. Recycle. 

Just because something is irrelevant on the macroscopic level, doesn’t make it any less morally right. The important part is that it’s just a first step.

Until next time.

Of all the concepts I came across in high school biology, positive and negative feedback loops always stuck with me the most. One of the things that made them sticky is that I found the adjectives so unintuitive — ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ say really rather little about whether a particular loop is good or not.

For a negative feedback loop, consider body temperature. When you get cold, your body starts shivering to warm you up. When you’re too warm, your body starts sweating to evaporate heat. In both cases a system (your body) self-corrects to contain temperature within sustainable limits. 

In contrast, a positive feedback loop is self-reinforcing. It’s a force that essentially spins a system out of control. Positive feedback loops are why games of Monopoly tend to end shortly after hotels start towering up. 

Negative loops maintain the status quo. Positive loops perpetuate change. This post is about the latter — often scarier — kind of loop. It’s about how they are cropping up in nature, how they’re being triggered by our economic system, and how this system may in fact be underpinned by a loop of its own. Finally, I briefly consider how Verdn can tap into these loops to counteract other, more destructive ones.

Staying cool on a heating planet:

A few weeks ago, a heatwave saw temperatures in London rise to over 40 °C (104 °F) for the first time on record. Like most Londoners, I spent these evenings sweltering in an apartment without air conditioning (AC). The buildings here, if anything, are designed to keep heat in.

While the ostensible purpose of AC is to keep us cool, the irony is that it heats up the planet — both from the energy it requires and the atmospherically heat-trapping HFC gases that many AC units use. Worse yet, warmer temperatures create more demand for AC. It’s a system stuck in a positive feedback loop:

As the planet warms, humans will install more — and use more — AC to stay cool. Air conditioning units use huge amounts of electricity,1 most of which is carbon-intensive. Carbon-intensive electricity heats up the planet, necessitating even more AC, which requires ever-more electricity…

The scale of this problem is a lot larger than one might intuit. AC was estimated to use 10% of global electricity in 2016. Over the next few decades, demand will rise both as a result of warmer climates, and growing middle classes in developing nations. By one estimate, the energy used by AC is expected to triple by 2050, and by another it could account for as much as a 0.5 °C rise in global mean temperatures by 2100.

A song of ice and fire

Twelve thousand years ago, Earth emerged from its most recent ice age. Ever since, our planet has found itself in somewhat of a goldilocks zone of environmental conditions. The rise of modern civilisation was fully contingent on such a stable global environment.

One of the contributing conditions to this goldilocks zone was polar ice. The polar ice caps are a lot better at reflecting sunlight back into space than oceans and land. It’s called the ‘Albedo Effect’.

A little-known-fact is that we are still technically in the last ice age, because our polar ice caps persist year round. Humanity seems hell-bent on shedding this technicality as fast as it can. 

The density of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is measured in parts per million (ppm). Before the industrial revolution, atmospheric CO₂ was at 270 ppm. Now, less than three centuries after Spinning Jenny, it is over 410 ppm — a number not seen in at least one million years.

This would be bad enough by itself, but in fact it’s only getting worse — faster. Melting polar ice and increasing global temperatures are interlocked in a positive feedback loop:

As the planet warms, the world’s poles and ice caps melt. White ice reflects more sunlight into space than water and land do. As the surface area of ice decreases, the planet absorbs increasingly more solar radiation, which heats the planet more, which melts increasingly more ice…

While some positive feedback loops might theoretically spin out of control forever, there is a rising consensus that the planet may have certain emergency brakes. None of them are deemed comfortable, which is at least on-brand as far as the metaphor goes. One such brake might be the Gulf Stream, the North Atlantic current pumping warm water from the gulf of Mexico up to Northern Europe. It’s what makes the climate in Oslo different from Siberia — at least historically.

As the poles melt, trillions of tonnes of cold fresh water dilutes and upsets the Gulf Stream. The ocean current won’t stop overnight like in The Day After Tomorrow, but when it eventually slows down enough (and signs points to it being inevitable) the effects will be catastrophic. Part of Western Europe would be exposed to plunging temperatures in conditions mimicking a small ice age. Irony abound.

The Gulf Stream is currently at its weakest point in at least 1600 years.

The methane bomb

In large swaths of land in and around the Artic Circle (Canada, Russia) there is permafrost: ground considered to be frozen all-year-round. Global warming is thawing permafrost at completely unprecedented rates. This has scientists in panic mode because, as it turns out, there’s a lot of bad stuff locked away in that glacial soil. 

One example of said bad stuff is disease. Scientists have been able to recover (and reanimate) smallpox and bubonic plague from permafrost. Mysterious cases of wildlife dying off have later proven to be anthrax seeping from age-old carcasses, finally able to decompose after hundreds or even thousands of years of stasis. Worst of all though, is the fact that embedded in the permafrost are billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas up to 100x more potent than carbon dioxide.

As the planet warms, permafrost melts to release gargantuan amounts of methane previously locked in the frozen ground. Methane is a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere and warms the planet. The rising temperatures increase the rate of melting permafrost, which in turn increases the rate of released methane…

Triggering this “methane bomb” would quite comfortably take us past what’s considered a planetary tipping point. This single positive feedback loop would trigger others. The result would be runaway climate change in quite the literal sense, but there will be practically nowhere to run. Except for Elon, maybe?

Et tu, capitalism?

Capitalism is inextricably linked to the concept of growth. Most economic measures of growth are analysed with percentages: GDP per annum, revenue per month, you name it. Functions that grow consistently by some percentage value are exponential — their total value increase faster and faster.

In few cases is this illustrated more clearly than when looking at compounding interest, itself part of the very backbone of market economies. So powerful is this mechanism that Einstein is purported to have said that “compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world”. 

It does seem like magic when you start running the numbers: $10,000 growing at 3% per year for 50 years is $45,000. Double the duration to 100 years and you don’t get twice the money, you get over four times the money: $200,000.

Read literally, Einstein’s quote implies that compound interest is a human invention worthy of standing alongside the Pyramids. That’s taking too much credit. Rather, it’s a case of humans unlocking and abusing the unfettered power of positive feedback loops. Capitalism, quite fundamentally, is the pegging of society to a mathematical axiom.

A principal investment yielding interest payments increases the total amount, which yields higher interest payments, which increases the total amount further still, ad infinitum…

The kicker here is that growth under capitalism has been in firm lockstep with rising energy demand, and energy has fundamentally correlated to carbon emissions in the same timeframe (renewables are only just starting to decouple this effect). Still, we choose growth: growth over sustainable development… Growth above all. Aligning society with this one positive feedback loop has thrown off the balance of nature and triggered a series of natural feedback loops in turn. These new forces, ever spiralling, may well come to challenge the very concept of the capitalist civilisation that instigated them.

An addendum: Spiralling positive change

Verdn’s mission has always been to make sustainability profitable. This is our company’s mission because a solution being profitable is a prerequisite for mass-adoption under capitalism. 

In light of feedback loops and their power, this mission makes more sense than ever — but with a small twist. When we started on our journey two years ago, we wanted to prove that companies could use Verdn to donate a fraction of their revenue to sustainable causes, and in turn increase their bottom line.

We’ve since realised that the silver bullet is to prove that a larger positive impact has a larger effect on a company’s bottom line. This causal link, however slight, measured as a percentage, could trigger an unstoppable force:

By donating a portion of revenue to sustainability through Verdn, businesses attract and retain more customers. This makes the company more money which increases the level of sustainable donations. This, in turn, attracts and retains even more customers, which makes the business even more money…

There’s lots of work to do, but this is our North Star. We only have to get far enough for this more fundamental force of nature to take over.

Until next time.

Nic Dunn is the founder of Charle, a London-based, Shopify-accredited expert agency, who works with a wide range of brands across the globe to design, develop and optimise Shopify and Shopify Plus stores. On a day-to-day basis, the Charle team works closely with the concept of buying behaviours of customers, how ethical the brand’s efforts are, and how the merchants’ approach to sustainable processes, products and post-purchase engagement is incredibly important to buyers.

Nic spoke with us about how he thinks having a sustainable approach to ecommerce is a win-win situation. Here are the questions we asked him: 

What influences customers' buying experiences?

“Customers leaving a website before they’ve engaged with a store or even after they’ve added something to the cart is one of ecommerce merchants' biggest mysteries. At Charle, we work with some of the world’s most ambitious brands to help them identify key design, user experience and foundational problems within a website that can deter customers. Brands’ approaches to sustainability is one of the things we look at. Research has found that 62% of young consumers in the United Kingdom say they would reconsider buying if retailers better communicated about their environmental impact.”

How important is sustainability?

“Sustainability can be an amazing unique selling point (USP) to set you apart from your competition. Consumers are growing more conscious, and they are consistently making more ethical purchasing decisions.”

“We are seeing more and more brands driving sustainable processes through their offering with the rise of certifications such as B-Corp and 1% For The Planet. Not only is it amazing for the planet, but it’s also a win-win for converting customers, as they build a sense of loyalty and trust to your brand.”

How do you go about communicating an online store’s sustainability?

“Quite often we see our merchants overthink how they can use sustainability or USPs in general when convincing customers. We always take it back to basics, starting with the message they want to communicate and then shaping the store design to achieve that.”

“We absolutely love how easy it is to deliver a clear, clean and concise message of eco related pledges directly through Shopify when connected with Verdn. Customers won’t dig around searching every part of a page for USPs — it’s right there in your face as part of the value proposition. We also love how Verdn’s UI is customisable and can therefore fit into basically any page!”

How do you optimise the roll-out of a campaign focused on sustainability?

“Although Charle works on a lot of large scale projects, we also know the power that small tweaks, design changes and integrations can have on customer engagement. It’s a big plus when those changes also represent something that will protect our planet. Our memberships are designed for Shopify and Shopify plus merchants so that they can have developers on hand to make tweaks and changes, and even integrate amazing apps like Verdn. You can learn more about memberships here.”

You can learn more about Charle by visiting their website. They also recently wrote an article about Verdn, which you can read here.

Ocean plastic is a stain on our collective consciousness, as well as a physical one on the blue marble we call home. In some regards, ocean plastic pollution has become the poster child for humankind’s planetary disregard.

It is estimated that over 8 million tonnes of plastic is added to our oceans every year. That’s 5 plastic bags of trash for every foot of coastline in the world, or a dumpster truck emptied into our seas every minute. Perhaps most repulsively of all, it is estimated that by 2050 ocean plastic will outweigh fish — all fish. 

The global response has been all over the map, from international regulation banning single use plastic (potentially very good, in the long run), and the banning of plastic straws (which I have argued is ineffective), to private sector initiatives (everything from 4Ocean, to The Ocean Cleanup Project) trying to physically clean up the oceans. 

Yet if our goal is to maximise our impact on ocean health, there is much lower-hanging fruit. The main one is this: recovering plastic at source, just before it escapes to sea. This is the same kindergarten logic that says if you’re emptying a bath, you turn off the tap before pulling the plug. The tap in question is our 8-million-tonne-a-year problem. And, as it turns out, turning it off might not be as hard as it sounds. 

A Tale of 10 Rivers, and Globalisation

The reason we have a chance against the deluge of ocean plastic is because its origins are centralised. Indeed, quite remarkably so. As much as one quarter of all ocean plastic — 2 million tonnes a year — originates from just 10 rivers. Eight of these are in South East Asia, the last two in Africa. These rivers aren’t close to each other by chance: the majority flow through the same cluster of emerging economies, most of which have severe regulatory shortcomings that enable and perpetuate the situation.

The 10 rivers responsible for 25% of all ocean plastic

This is not happening in a vacuum. The regulatory issues of these countries have not only been known for decades, but have been purposefully exploited by the West in its quest for ever-cheaper consumption, fuelled by globalisation. Indeed, the West has grown utterly dependent on outsourced manufacturing to these parts of the world, where labour is cheap, conditions are poor, and the environment is ignored. These rivers flow through the same countries where all your Stuff™ is made.

Furthermore, the West engages in the same form of regulatory arbitrage with regards to waste itself. Half of all collected waste intended for recycling is traded internationally. That’s as much as 16 million tonnes — twice as much as the annual addition of plastic to our oceans. It’s traded because it’s cheaper. A lot cheaper: for San Fransisco recycling firm Recology, shipping waste to Asia saves 90% compared to domestic processing. 

Just like the gyres of plastic in the great pacific garbage patch, a fleet of ships with literal garbage as cargo circulate the pacific every day.

The result is a sordid scenario. Not only are underprivileged workers labouring to make the innumerable things we consume in the West, but once we are done with them — like an older, careless sibling — we hand them back, broken, to be disassembled, destroyed, or simply thrown away. A lot ends up in rivers. A lot a lot.

Stemming the tide

Yet in all of this lies a huge opportunity. Not only do these 10 rivers make it possible to organise cost-effective plastic cleanup operations, but with the right business model, we could simultaneously provide high wages to hard-working, disadvantaged locals. The very same locals who have been shortchanged by globalisation, with no realistic capacity to caretake the environment given their current socio-economic conditions.

Enter Empower, Verdn’s plastic cleanup partner. 

An Empower ocean plastic cleanup on the coast of Mumbai, India

Inspired by the Norwegian bottle deposit system (one of the most effective recycling schemes in the world), Empower is establishing a global plastic waste ecosystem that gives plastic a fixed monetary value. 

In every country they enter, Empower establishes collection points together with local partners (NGOs or charities), providing financial rewards to all those who deposit waste. All plastic is digitally registered upon collection, allowing Empower to trace the recovered plastic back up the supply chain, while helping them keep tabs on how it’s reused. They’ve already organised cleanups in more than 15 countries, including those that see the Niger, Mekong and Ganges rivers flow through them (all members of the 10 usual suspects).

This is how Empower’s and Verdn’s business models work in tandem to create value and change: 

1. A consumer buys an ‘impact product’ that pledges ocean plastic cleanup from a brand using Verdn’s software.

2. Verdn sends the impact fee to Empower, which allows them to guarantee a financial reward for deposited plastic at their collection sites in Africa and Asia.

3. The local waste pickers earn a stable, high-paying (and indeed sometimes life-changing) wage from recovering plastic.

4. Empower sends tracking data back to Verdn, which allows us to inform each consumer when and where plastic was collected on their behalf.

This model has the potential to enable a massive redistribution of wealth from the West back to the world’s poor, and we do it by fully monetising the rising trend of conscious consumerism and directing the funds to where it matters most. 

And it matters more now than ever. Due to country-wide lockdowns, waste pickers across the world have been unable to do their job, and they’ve lost their incomes as a result. In response, Empower has set up a Waste Picker Aid Fund, essentially a micro-loan service, that ensures some financial continuity for locals in exchange for future plastic deposits. If you have the means to donate, you can do so here.

Until next time.

Photo: Michel Stockman

In 2018, plastic straws fell out of society’s good graces. For most people, it really seemed to come out of the blue, namely Blue Planet II. The BBC documentary’s final episode dealt with the effects of plastic on the oceans, and it rang the year in, airing on January 1st. Separately, but in no doubt benefitting from the rising awareness, various organisations launched a series of hashtags like #skipthestraw and #stopsucking. Their goals were the same as — and thus gave a second wind to — Milo Cress’ “Be Straw Free” campaign, which he had launched back in 2011 when he was just nine years old. All of this was galvanised by the re-emergence of a 2015 clip of a marine biologist pulling a jammed straw from the nose of a pained sea turtle. 

The perfect storm: The Google trend for "Plastic Straw Ban”

The response was huge. The city of Seattle voted to ban plastic straws. The state of California legislated a phase-out. Airlines (Emirates), companies (Disney), and major chains (Starbucks and McDonalds) joined in. All of this in a matter of weeks. It was, undoubtably, a great display of how the public can force through both corporate and institutional change if the pressure reaches a certain fever pitch — a trend that has replicated itself several times in the short years since.

However, while the main narrative was one of victory (a victory for sustainability, the seas, and for turtles) I would argue that it was very little of any of those. In fact, given the size of the problems at hand with ocean plastic in particular and plastic more generally, it’s my opinion that this campaign wasted a lot of public momentum for minimal overall gain.

The myopia of the ‘ban plastic straws’ campaign

The straw man fallacy describes a form of argument wherein you misrepresent and simplify your opponent’s position and then attack this new view — the straw man — instead of the original, more complex position. 

What the straw man fallacy is to a discussion, the straw ban was to the issue of ocean plastic. Instead of slowly, deliberately and painstakingly grappling with the convoluted issue at hand, we manifested a simpler, one-dimensional villain, and then swiftly killed it. We did all of this while leaving the original problem completely, utterly, unresolved. 

As far as I can tell, this is not the fault of anyone in particular, and perhaps it may even be an inherent Catch-22 to public protesting and campaigning. You must boil a problem down into a single punchline to rally the populace to take action, yet you do so at the expense of this action not amounting to much at all.

An Old Fashioned drink, in more ways than one (Photo: Sandie Clarke)

One way of measuring whether a public campaign has suffered at the hand of its own reductionism is perhaps to see how hard the private sector fights against it. This for the simple reason that companies’ primary purpose is profit: social and environmental undertakings are costs (if they were profitable, any well-run company would have implemented them already). 

In the case of the plastic straw ban campaign, companies jumped aboard suspiciously fast. In doing so, they achieved two things: 

1. They managed to lean into the progressive ‘conscious consumer’ movement, proclaiming their dedication to the oceans for positive PR, media mentions, and general goodwill. All factored in, swapping to more expensive paper straws probably yielded a very nice return on investment for most of these companies. 

2. They did not have to rethink their fundamental relationship to plastic. Textbook greenwashing. By signing on quickly to the straw ban, hammering the point and keeping the conversation focused (or rather myopic), a company like Starbucks did not, for example, have answer for the far more destructive business practice of selling every drink for takeaway in a disposable cup that is at least part plastic. Globally, a total of 500 billion of those are sold each year. Five hundred billion.

This same myopia is also experienced by the public. With the issue of ocean plastic simplified to whether you ‘skip the straw’ and bring your own metal drinking tube to the café (or your own bag to the supermarket), you might turn a blind eye to other, more harmful industries that you tacitly partake in. For example, perhaps you enable the $35 billion fast fashion industry, an industry that will deliver polyester (plastic) clothing the same day you order it, neatly packed in several layers of plastic packaging. If you don’t like those clothes, you can send them back for a full refund, either to be re-wrapped again or simply discarded. If you do keep the clothes, they’ll start shedding micro-plastics in your washing machine. 

There are other major dragons that must be slain too: like the endemic of single-use plastic in food deliveries (which have exploded in 2020), and new ones like disposable masks, the market for which is expected to grow from a starry $800 million last year to a supernova-like $166 billion this year.

Photo: Brian Yurasits

What did we lose sight of?

To reset the narrative, here are some of the facts we may have lost sight of: 

• For all the issues of plastic straws, they are so incredibly light that they constitute only 0.025% of the plastic in the ocean by weight. 

• Every year, an estimated 8 million tonnes of plastic ends up in our oceans. Plastic straws account for approximately 2,000 of those 8,000,000 tonnes.

• All the plastic that ends up in the ocean is a mere 2.3% of the astronomic 350 million tonnes of plastic produced every year – half of which is intended for single use, and less than 10% of which is ever recycled. 

The plastic problem is enormous. It requires systemic changes. And while there are positive developments, including ambitious EU regulation on phasing out single-use plastics, there is no doubt that the deluge of waste will continue into our seas for years to come.

So, we must stop it.

We can do this by literally fishing for plastic before it gets lost at sea — starting with the lowest hanging fruit: the 10 most polluted rivers on Earth, responsible for as much as 25% of all ocean plastic. This is what we at Verdn will do with our partner Empower, the where’s and how’s and why’s of which will be discussed in the next post.

Until next time. 

Photo: Allie [edited]

Back in October of 2019, Rory and I were staying late in the office one night, trying to come up with a company name (for Verdn). 

We had spent our spare time over the past year on a sustainable eyewear concept, only to realise that the true potential in the idea lay in software. Our name for the glasses was Atlas. Already for eyewear, that name was problematic. For software it was positively radioactive. As ‘exhibit A’ we had Stripe, a billion-dollar payment platform with a service called Atlas that we were stupid — in hindsight — for even considering to use. 

I really liked Atlas. It was short. And it was nicely symbolic: In greek mythology, Atlas is the titan that holds up the heavens. In illustrations, he is normally depicted as holding up the entire world. Given the impact we wanted to pledge with each purchase of eyewear (80 kg of ocean plastic cleanup), that’s how I wanted our customers to feel. 

“We need something completely different,” Rory said. “Nothing mythological. We need to create a word. Something without meaning before we give it meaning.”

“Like Nike?” I suggested.

“Sure."

Rory eyed the back wall of our office. We had just gotten a whiteboard so big, that not even Jackson Pollock would’ve known where to start pouring on it.

“Alright. This is what we’re going to do.”

He walked up to the (truly inconveniently) large whiteboard and wrote out, without pause, the following conditions: 

THE LIST

1. Dot-com < $5k

2. No NICE clash

3. Duo-syllabic

4. Verb-able

5. Irrelevant Google searches

6. The literal link to the business model/mission is tenuous at best

1. Dot-com < $5k

Most important to Rory was that we could get the dot-com. “If you don’t have the dot-com, you’re a nobody”. As a side note, Atlas.com is in fact available – it can be yours today for the bargain price of $8 million. 

2. No NICE clash

NICE refers to trademarks in Europe, and there’s an online database where you can check everything that’s both pending and registered. ‘No NICE clashes’ means that no companies have registered your name or a very similar one in the classes that are relevant to you. There are 45 classes total, ranging from relatively specific (class 3 = paints, varnishes, ink) to broad (class 42 = hardware AND software). 

3. Duo-syllabic

Rory wanted the name to be as short as possible. Atlas is 5 letters and two syllables. Preferably we’d manage to replicate something snappy like that, even if it meant compromising on spelling (e.g. tickr, Toggl or Dribbble). 

4. Verb-able

It’s a big plus if the name can be turned into a verb so as to fit more easily into the vernacular. “Just google it” is the quintessential example here. Which leads into…

5. Irrelevant Google searches

Which is self-explanatory. If you think you have a good name, simply googling it is a decent litmus test and definitely a good place to start the validation process.

6. The literal link to the business model/mission is tenuous at best

This one was added on the tail-end to hammer home the point that we had to be more clever. To achieve the above conditions, we had to look beyond variations of “Eco” and “Green” and “Sustainability”. In fact, they were to be largely excluded from consideration. 

With Rory’s list demarcating our brainstorm, this was our whiteboard soon after:

As with any good creative session, the quality was all over the map. 

We had some interesting thoughts (Pakt, Enpact, Ecocred, Karmaccount); We had references to places we used to live (Strata), nicknames of family friends (Atilla) and – unbeknownst to us – a candidate name for Elon Musk’s future kid (DeltaQi7); We had parts of words (Amelio: from ‘ameliorate’ – to make something bad, better), and inelegantly smashed together parts of more blatantly thematic words (SusTerra). And, lest we forget, we had some downright awful ones (Plaad, Plance, Shing. I think those were Rory’s). 

Mixed in with all of it, we had Verdn.

I had jotted Verdn down during a brainwave to look for inspiration from Norwegian. The same brainwave that made me write down Brage, Grønn, and others. Verdn, spelled “Verden”, translates to “World”. 

Rory took a liking to it first. It didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and Google insisted on showing us the Battle of Verdun instead, but it did hit his criteria. No one was using it. It was a five letter dot-com that we could nab for a couple of dollars. “In 2019, dude. This is huge.”

For me, meaning was most important, and I came around to it quickly. There was nice obvious symbolism, it was fittingly broad since we’d be doing software with various types of impacts, and it even carried on the theme of Atlas. I liked it starting with “V” because it made me think of a “Verified” checkmark. Also, draw a line over the “V” (like we do in our logo), and you have an inverted delta, the greek symbol for ‘change’. Rory — profusely Google-Translating throughout our brainstorm — discovered that variations of “Verd” tend to mean “green” across many languages. Furthermore, “Verdant” is an English word meaning “covered with healthy green plants or grass”. Very convenient. 

The Verdn logo

A couple of weeks after settling on Verdn, I presented the concept to an acquaintance over coffee. He asked about the name and I explained it, adding on that “maybe one day it’ll be one of those common brand names without much inherent meaning. Like Nike”. He replied: “Oh, well Nike is the Greek Goddess of victory.”

Bested at my own game, until next time. 

Photo: Chris Liverani

If you were a Catholic living in the Middle Ages and you happened to kill a man, odds are you believed you were headed for hell. Luckily, if you came from money, you had a straightforward way out. You could simply buy absolution, a formal discharge from all the supernatural obligations of your actions. 

Not only was this convenient, it was also institutional, and commodified. As such, different sins even came with different price tags. For example, murder by poison would set you back quite a bit more than murder by more… vanilla means. 

This decade we need to drastically reduce global carbon emissions or else we will chronically and irreversibly overheat our planet. Quite the more literal hell — considering the Australian and Californian wildfires just last year. But our tools to do so, according to people like George Monbiot, are archaic. In 2006, he equated the act of buying absolution to the current trend of buying ‘carbon offset’. 

Carbon offset is a reduction in CO2 emissions made in order to compensate for emissions that occur elsewhere.

An Example

CarboCut Ltd emits 1,000 tonnes of CO2 per year, but they want to be carbon neutral. Being in the shipping business and relying on bunker fuel, they can’t stop their own emissions, so they decide to offset them instead. 

Through a third party, the company invests a bunch of money in a clean cooking stove initiative in Africa. A bunch of families are given a new stove that produces less CO2 compared to cooking with firewood, or charcoal. In fact, over the course of a year, each stove produces 1 tonne less than the alternative. So: CarboCut Ltd hands out 1,000 stoves, each with a CO2 saving of 1 tonne, which all together sum up to the company’s own emissions. Easy!

So What is the Problem?

It doesn’t work. Not always anyway – the reason for which is multi-faceted: 

• You have different types of third-party providers with varying levels of credibility when it comes to executing a project to spec.

• You have different types of projects whose impacts range from hypothetical (protecting a forest), to estimated (cooking stove distribution, renewable energy investment), to real (planting new forest). 

• And then you have issues with the carbon accounting itself — given, say, that a tree takes 25 years to grow, or those cooking stoves just aren’t that clean. 

On the other side of the equation you have some heavyweight industries (like aviation) liberally using carbon offset, and the mechanism has been further legitimised by the UN after the Paris Agreement. Which means that, quite realistically, it’s not going away anytime soon.

If it’s not going away, we need to make it better. Cue:

The Principles

The list below is a guideline for what makes effective offset. It contains the same main principles outlined in a Google White Paper elaborating on how they decide on what projects to invest in. It’s a stellar read, assuming you’re a sucker for the process of making CO2 (bad) from manure-derived methane (20x bad). Also, I double-checked (using Google, mind — tinfoil hat on…) that these principles are established elsewhere in the literature, albeit with some variation. The fifth and final principle is our own.

1. Additionality

A project provides “additionality” when it reduces emissions that would not be reduced through other measures or incentives. 

Would the African community get energy efficient cook stoves if CarboCut Ltd hadn’t distributed them? Would the windmill you financed get built anyway? Did Google approach a manure farmer with a bag of cash and ask him to flare methane that he was planning to flare anyway? Is this opportunistic farmer laughing all the way to the bank‽ While never technically possible to prove, one must stay away from projects where the additionality is at all ambiguous, or else one cannot safely claim offset.

2. Leakage Prevention

If the existence of a carbon offset project simply moves emissions elsewhere, leakage occurs. 

Say, for example, that you pay me to preserve a forest that is about to be logged. You check in a year later, and the forest still stands. All good, right? That private jet is officially compensated for. Well, maybe. If the local area has loggers, it could very well be that they've simply moved along to the next forest – one without any protection – and gone to town on it. If so, net emissions will probably be the same.

3. Permanence

The concept of permanence simply considers the concept of leakage over longer timeframes. It refers most specifically to carbon sequestration projects. 

If you pay someone to plant a lot of trees for you, you want to:

1. Make sure those trees stay in the ground for the 25 years they need to grow, and…

2. Ensure they stick around for a whole lot longer than that to actually keep the carbon they’ve absorbed out of the atmosphere. 

4. Verifiability

For any carbon offset project to be considered legitimate, it must have verifiability. This entails that an objective third-party — often a specialised institution, reviews the project data and certifies the project as credible and accurate. 

5. Timeliness

A carbon offset project has timeliness if the carbon is compensated for within a reasonable timeframe. 

Given the pressure on total emissions to fall in the next decade, delays — even those of only a year or two — can be crucial in reaching those goals. Again, forest planting springs to mind. Forests are great, but a company that pollutes 1,000 tonnes CO2 today, and then plants trees that will recapture those 1,000 tonnes over 25 years, are involved in PR, not climate change mitigation. Carbon emitted now must be offset now — it’s our only chance to stop the warming before it spirals out of control. At some point soon, we just can’t put the bunny back in the box.

These principles are crucial to us at Verdn, and they guide us as we seek-out impact partners, whether that be for carbon, plastic waste, or future ones like water conservation. You can see what partners have currently passed the test on our website.

I absolve thee, until next time.

Photo: Shalone Cason

Photo: Razvan Narcis Ticu

As we are quickly ramping up to release Verdn on the Shopify App Store, a million curiosities and questions are quickly distilling down to just one: will companies like this? Or, when I don’t really feel like sleeping anyway: will companies like this enough to pay for it?

As an attempted remedy, I thought I would explicitly review the ‘why’s behind some of our key product features at launch. Like Simon Sinek, just without the flair. Partly to take my mind off it, but partly also to put it at ease. If nothing else, it does happen to be a rather esoteric combination of research into business theory, social psychology, and consumer behaviour, one which I currently don’t have written down anywhere else (Siri, remind me to write a business plan).

Hell, maybe one day this will be part of the company’s historical documents, in a Galaxy Quest kinda way.

Verdn, put simply

Let’s start by summarising the software itself. Verdn is a service for e-commerce businesses. With Verdn installed, an e-commerce merchant is able to effortlessly attach environmental impacts onto the products they sell. These impacts are offered through vetted partners of ours, and are trackable by consumers post-purchase.

An example: A business sells t-shirts online. With Verdn installed, they can make it so that every time they sell a BlueWave t-shirt they also finance 5 kilos of ocean plastic cleanup – the same as 400 plastic bottles. When a prospective customer explores the web-page for the t-shirt in question, it will look something like this:

Three key decisions / features

Already from the short description above, you can extract several defining attributes that shape what we offer, and I’ll review how each came to be in turn:

1. Impact is attached directly to individual products

2. Impact is included / embedded in the product price

3. Impact is unique and trackable in a post-purchase journey

Impact is attached directly to individual products.

Verdn, while engaged in B2B sales, was created out of changing consumer trends. Conscious consumerism is inexorably on the rise. Millennials were consistently found to be the most environmentally aware generation ever… until they weren’t. They have now been usurped by the even more radical Generation Z.

If you’re a company, how can you best tap into this increasing demand for sustainability? As it turns out, the answer is to integrate impact directly into your products, as opposed to making generic commitments as a brand: 70% of consumers say they prefer it.

This is quite a profound finding. And on some levels, it’s counter-intuitive. It means that the average consumer on Nike.com would be more convinced by a smaller, specific impact (“10 trees are planted if you buy these”) over a general, much larger commitment (“Nike will plant 100,000 trees this year”). The difference is the sense of responsibility, and the consumer feeling like they made a difference. We have designed Verdn to facilitate that feeling, and to empower consumers in this way.

Impact is included in the product price

There are a lot of services out there that let consumers donate to a charity or cause at the point of sale. For example, airlines let ticket buyers offset their flight emissions.

We did not want to do that. We want impact to be imbedded in the offering — essentially a product feature. In our model, if the company wants consumers to pay, they have to tweak the price (and we do let them, in the software).

The main reason for this approach is a concept known as ‘loss aversion’. Loss aversion is humans’ tendency to value losses more than gains. Losing $5 makes us a lot more unhappy than finding $5 makes us happy. It’s considered illogical, but hardwired into our biology nonetheless. The inverse of this observation is that humans value what they already have way more than what they could have. We are risk averse. And it’s quantifiable exactly how much so. By reviewing experiments conducted by Novemsky and Kahneman, Julian Baggini derived that ‘one bird in the hand is worth 2.48 in the bush’: approximately half a bird more than the saying originally goes.

What does this all mean for impact? Well essentially, if a consumer is buying a t-shirt and is then suddenly prompted to spend additional cash on an environmental impact, we are fighting against their evolutionary wiring. And what we are offering has to be worth a whole lot more than the money we ask for. Instead, we remove that dissonance, letting the impact be a positive bonus, not an unforeseen test of altruism.

Impact is unique and trackable in a post-purchase journey

A customer interacts with a product in three discrete phases: pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase. According to NYU Professor Scott Galloway these are also the three main categories in which a company can build a brand.

Galloway argues that pre-purchase, the category that includes advertising and PR (activities most commonly associated with brand-building), has been over-invested in and now faces structural decline. Smart companies — and we believe good services by extension — should pivot their focus over to purchase and post-purchase activities to increase sales, engagement and customer loyalty.

This is what Verdn does. We don product pages with clear, unambiguous impact badges (purchase), and we invite consumers to track their impact afterwards (post-purchase). When a consumer checks in on their impact, they’re exposed to the brand they purchased from. Also, the mere existence of a unique tracking dashboard for each end-consumer is a boon to the company’s transparency, and a brand-benefit that extends far beyond the actual click-through rate.

By Grabthar's hammer, until next time.

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When I was quite young, my dad told me this story about Bono. He said that Bono once stopped a U2 concert – to the clear dismay of the audience – and began to clap on-stage, rhythmically and alone. After a good little while, thirty seconds or so, Bono leaned into his microphone.

“Every time I clap, a child dies of hunger,” Bono said.

“Then stop f**king doing it!” yelled a member of the audience in return.

According to the WWF, a football field of forest is cut down every 2 seconds. That’s the pace of a slow, perhaps sarcastic, clap. In the 90 minutes it takes to play a regulation soccer game, we lose 1,350 hectares of the stuff. 13.5 square kilometers. And that assumes the loggers take lunch during half-time.

The loss of forest is catastrophic for many reasons. Direct annual benefits of (standing) forests clock in at $130 billion. If you consider forests’ role in water provision, soil protection, carbon storage and climate regulation, the cost of deforestation is anywhere between $2-5 trillion annually. For estimates on the value of impacted wildlife, ecosystems, or undiscovered medicinal plants, one can only defer to Mastercard.

In our fight against climate change however, the true tragedy of our forest management is how effective forests could be in tackling the ‘emissions gap’.

The ‘emissions gap’ is essentially the difference between where we are, and where we should be, if we were serious about avoiding runaway climate change.

According to the UN, the global emissions gap in 2030 will be 14 GtCO2e. Put differently: in 2030 we will be releasing 14 billion tonnes of CO2 too much – every year – for us to limit global warming to only 2 degrees celsius.

How could forests help? Well, we are committing two huge faux pas: (1) we are cutting down too much, and (2) we are not planting enough – not so much a double-edged sword as Darth Maul’s lightsaber.

So what if we stopped deforestation? According to one source, we could shave 5 billion tonnes of CO2 off the emissions gap – over a third (and more than the EU’s total footprint). And what if we got serious about reforestation, and afforestation, on top? If we achieved the New York Declaration on Forests, which calls for 350 million hectares of restoration by 2030, we’d conservatively mitigate another 5 billion tonnes per year.

Suddenly, the emissions gap is down to 4 – just from giving a damn about the natural world. 4 billion tonnes is a lot of CO2 to stop every year, but it’s nothing a small price on carbon, the miracle of solar, or a pandemic, can’t feasible tackle.

I’ll talk more about all three of the above in future posts. And I’ll also dig into how Verdn will do its part to get more trees in the ground, by tying reforestation straight to consumer purchases online.

Until then.

Also, Snopes tells me the Bono story is false.