A new feature on carbon accounting app Commons steers people toward more sustainable brands, encouraging swaps to lower their overall climate impact.
Commons, which connects to peoples’ financial institutions to track the carbon emissions related to each purchase, highlights brands that maintain a Climate Neutral certification—demonstrating that they’ve measured and reduced their carbon emissions and offset the remainder.
With the new feature, people will receive a suggested swap from the app after making certain purchases. When they buy from one of over 300 Climate Neutral Certified brands, rather than an uncertified brand, the purchase will have no effect on their overall carbon footprint because the company behind that product has already offset their impact. Certified brands include clothing company Reformation, camera gear brand Peak Design, clean beauty company Saie and bamboo bedding company Ettitude.
“The goal is to reward brands that are doing the work to actually, measurably, reduce emissions and use our shared resources more responsibly and to help consumers feel really good about the places that they do choose to spend their money,” Sanchali Pal, CEO and founder of Commons, told Adweek. “But also, ultimately, to save money and to save carbon.”
Tapping into an eco-conscious consumer base
For Climate Neutral Certified brands, the new Commons app feature puts them in front of a uniquely climate-conscious audience.
“Commons is a really smart way of … creating the link between customers and the brands that are actually doing right [by the environment],” Peter Dering, CEO and founder of Peak Design, told Adweek. “Having a way to quantify how well brands are doing is totally useful.”
People can browse companies by category, including shoes, beauty, home goods, accessories, pets, secondhand, energy and travel.
“Any kind of discovery and access to new consumers and our ability to tell our stories are really beneficial—especially for consumers who are already concerned about climate change and the environment,” said Kat Dey, co-founder and president of Ettitude. “It’s great to tap into that audience and do a bit of education.”
Commons also offers information on how people can start composting to reduce food waste, lower the impact of laundry habits and opt for greener travel alternatives. Each of those activities can mitigate a user’s overall footprint, which they can then offset each month through the app.
Cutting through the greenwash
Commons ran a study on people’s barriers to shopping more sustainably and how the app could help solve those problems. Respondents said their biggest challenges were lack of trust in brands due to greenwashing, difficulty in finding sustainable options and the cost of sustainable products.
Users also expressed an interest in brand-specific recommendations through the app, which they said could motivate them to shift up to 75% of their purchases to more sustainable products.
Mitigating consumption-related emissions
While extractive industries have the greatest overall impact on rising global temperatures, the United Nations’ climate research body highlighted the opportunities related to more sustainable consumption in a 2022 report on climate change mitigation. The group estimates that consumption-related changes, focused primarily in high-income countries, could rapidly reduce global emissions by 5% with even greater potential as economies transition away from fossil fuels.
“The reality is, so few companies are actually doing anything about the climate,” Austin Whitman, CEO and co-founder of Climate Neutral, told Adweek. “How do we get more consumer eyes on the companies who are at least doing something and talking about it?”
Marketers play a key role in fostering desire for more sustainable habits and consumption patterns, something that groups like Purpose Disruptors and Comms Declare have highlighted in recent years.
“Our tool is supposed to help people make spending choices that are better for them and the planet, and often that means not buying anything,” Pal said. “So we’re not trying to be a shopping app. We’re trying to be very curated about helping people [by recommending] specific alternatives to things they’re buying that are more sustainable.”
