<aside> ✨ The breakdown you've been waiting for! We've laid out our carbon footprinting methodology in detail so you can understand the logic that powers our Neutral Carbon Impact Reports.

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Carbon Impact Report

Carbon Footprints

Neutral calculates the carbon footprint of your product by accounting for entire lifecycle of your product.

This calculation factors in all material and energy inputs consumed, material and energy outputs generated, transport, storage, and waste outputs generated throughout the life of a good

Data Source

Our carbon footprint calculations are directly sourced from CleanMetrics' CarbonScopeData database, one of the largest and most comprehensive LCI databases in North America. Through CarbonScopeData, we have access to the life cycle models of over 300 U.S. goods and services. This data is sourced from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's USEEIO v1.1 model to generate averages for the carbon footprint, water usage, and energy usage per $1 (2013 USD) demand of a given product in a category.

<aside> 💡 "The USEEIO dataset combines data on economic transactions between 389 industry sectors with environmental data for these sectors covering various resource uses and emissions, to build a life cycle model of 385 US goods and services. Of these resources and emissions, we use the same three that are used in our process LCI data: greenhouse gas emissions (embodied carbon), primary energy use (embodied energy) and water use (embodied/virtual water). The dataset represents the 50 US states. The model is intended to represent conditions for the year 2017 as closely as possible. Resource uses and emissions reflect the environmental burdens of producing one 2013 US dollar worth of a good or service."

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Calculation Breakdown

Through CarbonScopeData, we have access to the average carbon footprints per dollar production of products across over 300 U.S. goods and services.

Every time you visit a product on Amazon, using the category of your product, we apply its respective multiplier from CarbonScopeData onto the price of the good.

We can always do better.

Our team acknowledges that there are areas of improvement with our current methodology. Rest assured that as we eat, breathe, and sleep Neutral, we are continuously researching how we can do better.

Until then, we want to call-out a few caveats you should be aware of as you utilize our calculations:

• 🛍 Inter-category Comparisons: We have yet to accurately capture the comparative impact between products in the same category. In these cases, Neutral will always recommend the cheaper alternative.
  • To better help you make your purchase decisions, we've added "Neutral-certified" labels on all products produced by B Corporations and carbon negative brands.
• 📈 Averages: Remember that at the end of the day, our estimates are averages. After speaking with LCA and Sustainability analysts, we've come to the conclusion that this is likely the best we can do without the availability of transparent carbon footprint reporting from producers and suppliers.
  • Metrics are also currently overestimates, and we're currently looking into applying a discount to our estimates to capture the average markup companies apply on top of production costs.
• 📊 Limitations of CarbonScopeData: CarbonScopeData has been fundamental to the development of the prototype of Neutral. However, its model has not been updated since 2017. We have a roster of more up-to-date EEIO LCI databases to select from and will implement a data migration as soon as we obtain the proper data licenses.

<aside> 💡 Have ideas on how we can improve Neutral? We'd love to hear them! Reach out to us at [email protected] to start the conversation.

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