ShipGreen wants online consumers to ponder emissions impact

The Plain Dealer
Green Inc.
Friday, November 30, 2007
By Peter Krouse
Plain Dealer Reporter

The Internet can do a lot of things, but can it help prevent global warming?
ShipGreen thinks so.

The Colorado startup has developed software that lets consumers take responsibility for the greenhouse gases that spew from vehicles delivering packages to their door. It does so by calculating the amount of carbon dioxide emissions attributable to an online purchase. It then tells you how much more you need to spend to reduce the same amount of emissions somewhere else.

The extra dime or quarter on a single transaction might go to a renewable energy project, such as a wind farm in New Zealand, or perhaps to support a reforestation effort in China. "I think this is an idea that consumers may respond very well to," said Daniel Butler, vice president of retail operations at the National Retail Federation in Washington.

The trick will be getting major online retailers to offer it on their Web sites. ShipGreen has emerged when Americans are becoming more conscious of how their buying habits affect the environment, a development that hasn`t gone unnoticed by retailers.

The growing "buy local" movement is one example. An apple plucked from a nearby orchard is considered one less apple that has to arrive by exhaust-emitting truck from California. For that matter, a car assembled in the Midwest, and not overseas, means it doesn`t have to traverse an ocean and much of a continent to arrive in Northeast Ohio. Funny thing about carbon dioxide. It knows no bounds. Emissions on the high seas contribute as much to global warming as do greenhouse gases wafting above Cleveland.

Obviously, not everything can be acquired in your own back yard, so things will still have to get here from there. Transportation -- commercial and personal -- accounts for about one-third of the carbon dioxide produced worldwide, estimates Arpad Horvath, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at University of California at Berkeley and co-developer of the algorithm used by ShipGreen to make its calculations.

 That`s where ShipGreen comes in. It has targeted the largest online retailers in country and hopes to have a number of them signed on by next year. "I don`t think it`s going to be a quick process, and I don`t think it`s necessarily going to happen before Christmas," said Jason Sperling, chief executive officer of ShipGreen.

The ShipGreen icon would appear at an online retailer`s checkout point and be triggered by a simple click of the mouse. ShipGreen would then keep 30 percent of the online fees collected, with the remainder going to support those projects that meet the highest standards around, such as those provided by the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. ShipGreen would secure the ability to fund certain projects by sending money to them ahead of time and then recovering its investment from the fees.

Butler, of the National Retail Federation, said he plans to bring ShipGreen to the attention of his organization`s sustainable retailing consortium when it meets next month. Retailers are embracing a variety of green initiatives, he said. Some approach the issue through their supply chains, others in how they source or market their products. "It`s still a new frontier for many retailers," he said.

Sperling would love to land a company like Staples, the second largest online retailer in the country. The office supplies giant has a green philosophy, offering some 2,900 products made from post-consumer recycled materials and providing in-store collection areas for cell phones, computers and other gadgets.

Staples spokesman Mike Black called ShipGreen "an interesting idea" but said he doesn`t know whether Staples is considering it or not. The formula for calculating the CO2 emissions is complex. It takes into account the weight of the package, the likely modes of transportation to be used and the capacity of the vehicles. Also factored in are the costs of building transportation infrastructure, such as roads, airports, even oil refineries.

ShipGreen applies only to planes, trains and trucks that operate in the United States, but ultimately ShipGreen wants to extend its scope to include ocean-going vessels, Sperling said. That will require more cooperation with individual retailers. ShipGreen also is working on an offline product that can be accessed in a retail store.

ShipGreen was officially launched this month, and only Yogamates.com has been using it, having agreed to test the online service ahead of time. Yogamates is owned by Conscious Enlightenment, a California company that also owns Organic Media Design, which wrote the software used by ShipGreen. About 70 percent of those buying products at Yogamates.com pick the ShipGreen option, said Christopher Miglino, CEO of Conscious Enlightenment.

The benefit of a product like ShipGreen is its ability to more accurately measure the environmental cost of shipping a specific product and then giving consumers the ability to offset it. "If I buy something on Amazon.com and I want it to ship overnight, I need to take responsibility for it," Horvath said.

But it won`t work, Sperling said, unless ShipGreen can persuade some of the country`s biggest online retailers to take a chance on its idea. "For the business to be successful, we need to be working with the top companies," he said.

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