To reduce the carbon footprint from our deliveries we’ve signed up to support Shopify’s Sustainability Fund which aims to kick-start the Carbon Removal Market.  

What is carbon removal and why support it? 

Put simply, carbon removal is the process of capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then storing it. Efforts to remove carbon dioxide have the potential to reverse climate change. 

Carbon removal and sequestration (storage) is a fast-growing and evolving sector with many carbon removal technologies in different stages of development. These technologies include nature-based solutions, such as reforestation and soil carbon sequestration and more high-tech solutions, such as direct air capture and mineralization.

At the moment carbon removal is quite expensive but by investing in this emerging industry, Shopify hopes to enable these companies to scale and commercialise their technologies, kickstarting market forces and ultimately spurring solutions that will help protect and restore our planet.

So how exactly is my delivery carbon neutral, aren’t the emissions still being released into the atmosphere?

Most carbon neutral efforts involve offsetting - where after your emissions have been released you pay someone else not to emit as much as you have just put into the atmosphere - so your emissions are still up there causing climate change, by funding carbon removal we are supporting companies that are pulling the carbon out of the atmosphere and locking it away, so it undoes your emissions.   

How do you know how much carbon is released from one order?  

Two pieces of data are taken from our orders - how far it’s going and the weight of the package, that’s then used to calculate how much carbon dioxide has been released. So for example if delivering your order releases 1kg of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, Pasha Living will then pay an amount to Shopify who will then ensure that 1kg of CO2 is sucked from the atmosphere and stored away. This cost is not added to the cost of your order, but is funded directly by ourselves as an additional cost to us. However we can go one step further, if you pay using Shop Pay (Shopify’s own payment processing system, a bit like PayPal) then Shopify will cover this cost, and we will match it, so that if your order released 1kg into the atmosphere, Shopify will pay to take out 1kg and we will pay to take another 1kg out. 

Look for the Shop Pay icon during the payment stage at checkout. 

What exactly is carbon removal? 

To prevent the global temperature from increasing beyond 1.5°C we need to halve our global greenhouse emissions in the next decade. There needs to be a combination of reducing emissions and also removing them from the atmosphere. There are several pioneering companies supported by Shopify's Sustainability one of those is Climeworks https://climeworks.com/

To learn more about Shopify’s Sustainability Fund click here  

To discover more about Shopify’s fund partners visit... 

https://www.shopify.com/climate/sustainability-fund/partners