Get negative.
The best way to solve the world's biggest problem is to get negative. This is how it's done.
Measurement.
The first step in going carbon negative is measuring and understanding existing carbon emissions.
Conducting a complete Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) allows a business to calculate the total carbon emissions produced by a product. An LCA takes into account every stage in a product’s life, including material sourcing and extraction, manufacturing, transport, use of the product and how it’s discarded after use.
A business can also assess its entire operational impact by measuring the carbon it emits through all aspects of its operations. These might include manufacturing products, shipping, powering warehouses and offices, and more.
There are two ways to be carbon negative.
Products can be carbon negative from the get go.
In very rare cases, a product’s LCA will show that it is inherently carbon negative, despite the energy it takes to manufacture and transport such products. But how can this be possible?
Start with cork.
Natural cork represents up to 70 times its own weight in CO2 trapped from the atmosphere.
If cork forms a significant portion of the makeup of a product, its incredible carbon trapping properties can be enough to offset the entire impact of the product, including all aspects of material sourcing, production and transport.
Remember that while a product may be carbon-negative this does not guarantee that the company that produced it will be carbon negative as a whole.
Turn a positive into a negative.
There are two approaches to changing your footprint all the way to carbon negative.
Change the initial impact by incorporating cork.
This means redesigning a product to use enough cork to make up for the impacts of the rest of the product. A large variety of CO2 intensive foams and plastics can be replaced using ReCORK’s versatile cork composites.
Offsetting.
Companies can ‘cancel-out’ the impact of a product, or even their entire operations, by investing in carbon offsets. If they invest in enough offsets they can reduce their impact to the point that they are removing more carbon from the atmosphere than they produce, making them carbon negative.
Our favorite type of offsetting is planting cork oak trees that suck CO2 out of the atmosphere at a remarkable rate.
