When you buy products, do you ever wonder what the impact this purchase has on climate change? We think about it all the time. And we really would love for you not to have to. So, we decided to join the race to carbon neutrality – one of the few races in life that we all need to win. But the process can be a pretty difficult concept to grasp when buzzwords like ‘sequestration,’ ‘drawdown,’ and ‘offsetting,’ are thrown around without explanation or exploration of the concept.

Ever the free thinkers here at All Good, we asked the question – what would it take to turn All Good carbon neutral, to free our products from their carbon footprints and how fast could we get it done? Determined, All Good set a goal to become 100% Carbon Neutral by year’s end — and to be transparent, the process came with a fair share of confusion, obstacles, and a significant amount of research. Imagine tracking the estimated distance of all the All Good products shipped to front doors around the world?! Nonetheless, with focused energy and guidance from key partners in the sustainability movement, we officially became Climate Neutral Certified in November.

Becoming certified was just the cherry on top of a rewarding journey of measuring, reducing, and offsetting the carbon we are directly responsible for as a business (stay tuned for more on this later).

By funding grassland preservation in Colorado with Southern Plains Land Trust and Forest Conservation in California with McCloud Forestry project, we successfully offset as much carbon as we emitted through production in just 12 months. (Spoiler alert: more grasslands = less CO2. Keep reading for more). To celebrate our recent certification, we’re breaking down the issue of carbon, our quest to become carbon neutral, and our hopes for a carbon-free future.

THE MAIN OFFENDER

We can’t talk about becoming carbon neutral without discussing the elephant in the atmosphere: carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is the greenhouse gas most responsible for global warming, and is being released into the atmosphere at an average rate of 2.57 million pounds per second. That’s a lot of excess carbon. Mother Earth can maintain a healthy level of CO2 on her own, but we’ve far surpassed her comfort zone (and ours).

It is clear that the way we choose to live our lives is causing the natural world to warm at an extremely unnatural rate. Our responsibility as inhabitants of this earth is to acknowledge the impact we all have and minimize it as best we can, together. And while there are many ways that individuals can work to shrink their carbon footprint, it is crucial for businesses like ours to step up to the plate.

As a premium organic and botanically based body care brand, All Good is all about Making EveryBody Better®. We know there is a way to do business while also living in balance with nature; to create products that are good for you and delivered to you safely without unnecessary harm to our planet. That’s the way we’ve always done business.

HOW IT WORKS

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Our partnership with Climate Neutral allowed us to follow a step-by-step process so that we could offset all of the emissions used to make our products and ship them to your door. You purchase the goods, we pay for the cost of carbon. It’s that simple… (kinda).

1. MEASURE

First, we MEASURE the true environmental impact of our company with handy-dandy calculation tools. (Huge thanks to Climate Neutral for these).

2. REDUCE

Then, we focused internally on ways we can REDUCE our own carbon footprint. We’re big fans of renewable energy (…hold for applause) and this year elected to power our headquarters in Morro Bay with 100% renewable energy and even installed solar panels on our farm.

We also mulched and intercropped our medicinal Calendula Flowers in rows under fruit trees to reduce the need for weeding and watering and to support increased microbial content.

And! We launched new packaging for all of our sunscreens to be made from post consumer recycled plastic. These tactics will us chip away at our emissions as the days and months go on.

3. OFFSET

Then, the magic happens – OFFSETTING. We partnered with Native Energy to offset our carbon this year, but companies and individuals can choose an offsetting solution most important to them.

There are two main types of carbon offset projects: nature-based solutions and energy projects. Yin and yang.

Nature Based Solutions (like the one we used to offset our carbon this year) work to sequester carbon through storing carbon in the soil or in forests, for example.

Energy projects swap the use of fossil fuels for renewable resources, which is a sure-fire way to reduce a business’s environmental impact. Over 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels in the U.S. each year. Renewable energy sources – like solar and wind – don’t emit carbon dioxide.

UP NEXT

Becoming carbon neutral is just one step of many in the quest to drive systemic change that will positively impact the world’s climate. While this certification doesn’t explain everything we are doing to make everybody (and everything) better, it shows our commitment to zero out our carbon emissions year after year.

But we’re suckers for self-improvement. We recognize that we are always learning, humbled by the work we have in front of us and excited to keep on it. Now that we have the carbon emissions issue behind us, we look towards the future to take steps to further reducing our carbon footprint in the years to come.