Green-e® Climate Certified Terrapass Offsets

When you buy carbon offsets from Terrapass, you fund verified projects that reduce or remove greenhouse gas emissions, such as reforestation, forest conservation, landfill gas capture, and orphan well closure. Each 1,000 lbs you purchase represents 1,000 lbs of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) that a project has reduced or removed, confirmed by an independent registry.

This lets you take responsibility for an equal amount of your own emissions. For scale, 1,000 lbs of CO2e is a little more than what a typical car emits in a month of driving.

Carbon credits can be used to offset carbon emissions from all activities that add to your carbon footprint.

We encourage individuals and organizations alike to first reduce their carbon footprint as best they can. Most of us can’t reduce our carbon footprint to zero, so carbon credits can help you take responsibility for the emissions that remain.

For individuals, the three most common and measurable activities include:

1. Car travel: If you own a car, chances are that burning gasoline is a major source of carbon emissions.
2. Home energy use: Heating, cooling, and using appliances can be a significant source of emissions for many people.
3. Air travel: A round trip flight between New York and Los Angeles uses about 120 gallons of jet fuel per passenger. That single trip creates CO2 emissions equal to about 3 months of driving. Use our flight carbon calculator to estimate your trips.

Go to our carbon footprint calculator to calculate the emissions from these activities.

For businesses: Businesses engage in a number of activities that are carbon intensive and vary based on business type. In general, these activities include employees’ commutes, building energy use, servers and data storage, employee travel, and shipping or other freight. Our carbon footprint calculator and shipping and freight calculator can help you assess the major parts of your business’ carbon footprint, or you can contact one of our advisors.

Yes. Every offset Terrapass sells comes from a project whose emission reductions are verified by an accredited, independent third party at the project level, when and where the offsets are created. In addition, our total offset portfolio goes through a separate periodic review by a different accredited, independent third party.

Read more about our verification practices →

Carbon offsets allow individuals and businesses to be accountable for their unavoidable carbon emissions. While conservation is an important first step in fighting climate change, we need to do more to reduce greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. When you purchase carbon offsets from Terrapass you are supporting emission reduction projects in communities throughout North America and the world.

For businesses, calculating your carbon footprint is an important measurement of resources. Knowing and offsetting your carbon footprint creates value for your business by:

• Showing leadership and innovation. Taking action sends a strong message to your key stakeholders, including employees, customers, and investors, many of whom will hold your business accountable for its contribution to climate change.
• Involving your employees. A Terrapass employee program will help communicate your business’ dedication to the environment and infuse that commitment into your company’s culture.
• Aligning with your customers’ values. People prefer to do business with companies whose values align with their own. Demonstrating your business’ commitment to addressing climate change with a carbon offset program will help attract and retain valuable customers.

We check our projects at every stage. Before adding a project to our portfolio, we perform due diligence to fully understand its impact. Once a project is in our portfolio, its emission reductions are monitored and verified by accredited, independent third parties.

Every project must also pass the “additionality” test. Additionality asks whether your carbon offset purchase actually brings about reductions, or whether those reductions would have happened anyway. If carbon offset funding is a critical factor in making the reductions happen, they are considered “additional” to what would have happened under business as usual.