by tedpower on 7/20/22, 2:20 PM with 89 comments
Thomas and I found our way to this project via our background in fintech. Prior to Bend, I was a co-founder of Abacus (YC W14), a spend management company. At Abacus, we noticed that finance teams are increasingly paying attention to the climate impact of their purchase decisions, from travel policies, to cloud hosting, and beyond.
We believe this 'spend based' approach is the key to unlocking scalable carbon accounting. Today, most carbon accounting is manual, conducted once a year, and takes weeks or months to complete. It's like doing your taxes.
Fortunately, in the last couple years, we’ve started to reach a critical mass of good merchant data. It used to be that only a handful of companies tracked and disclosed their emissions. Today, 70%+ of Fortune 500 companies disclose their emissions in annual sustainability reports, and 1/3 of the entire global economy is now covered by a Science Based Target (and this coverage and quality is accelerating). The spend-based approach is fully automated and starts working the moment you connect your bank account.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that this emissions data is trapped in PDFs and blog posts, scattered across the internet. We aggregate and normalize this data by hand today, and plan to automate the process in the future.
Here’s how we measure the tCO2e (metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents) of your transactions: imagine that you get a $1,000 bill from Atlassian and want to know the carbon impact of that purchase. We know that for every $1,000 spent with Atlassian, there’s a 30.2 kg footprint — we multiply your bill total * (Atlassian’s annual emissions / Atlassian’s annual revenue) and return the tCO2e of that transaction.
Now imagine a similar calculation for each of the thousands of purchases your company makes every month / quarter / year. For merchants that don’t yet publish their emissions data, we fall back to category averages (e.g. for a Starbucks, we use the specific Starbucks carbon intensity factor, but for a mom-and-pop coffee shop that doesn’t disclose their greenhouse gas info, we use a generic benchmark ‘coffee shop’ factor).
To get a feel for the data we track, click on some of the corporate logos on https://bend.green/ — these aren’t customers; they’re examples of Bend’s merchant data. We have a climate scientist PhD on the team named Marion — we’d be happy to answer questions about our methodology!
Measuring and reducing your company’s emissions is of course good for the planet, but it also prepares your company for upcoming regulations and investor requirements. We help you create a 'climate profile' that you can use to close sales as the sustainable alternative to your competitors (you can share your info with prospects, customers, employees, investors, etc. — think of it like the climate equivalent of becoming SOC 2 compliant). And we just rolled out the ability to purchase carbon removal credits, powered by Patch, to offset some or all of your remaining emissions (optionally opt-in to automatic monthly purchasing).
Our pricing is $100 / month per company, and your company can try Bend for free for 14 days: https://app.bend.green/sign-up
Bonus points: if you’re building a fintech app, Bend data is also available via API (email us for API keys and docs). And if you work at a large / public company that already measures emissions, we encourage you to claim your company profile on Bend (for free!), and ask your vendors to track their emissions (after all, your vendors’ emissions become your emissions).
We’d love to hear your feedback and we’re excited to answer any questions!
by ramraj07 on 7/20/22, 2:42 PM
If you pay google 100 bucks, and See how google spends that money: it saves some, pays off its employees, it spends on infra and then finally on actual energy. Saved money is never accessed if parked. What it gives to other companies and people will spawn the same split we created when we paid google ad infinitum. Money spent on infra can have an outsized environmental impact (plastic, concrete) but I’m hoping we can ignore it, and the Final expenditure is pure energy.
I feel like if you keep breaking down every Avenue parts of your 100 bucks goes into, it’ll eventually go to creating energy more or less. Even if you choose google because they use green energy, the employees who are paid by google will use amazon powered Netflix so it might not matter any more than what’s the fraction of green energy in the total economy.
Thus the only solution to reduce your carbon footprint is to pretty much just spend less money! But no one wants that do they? They just want to have their cake and also eat it so we are just doomed.
Been outlining this for an article for a while, comments , prior research and criticism appreciated! https://www.ramrajv.com/blog/how-to-truly-reduce-your-carbon...
by loganbyers on 7/20/22, 4:55 PM
Without letting perfect be the enemy of good here... I have some questions.
It seems nice to have a backstop for what GHGP calls "Corporate-level data" which is the lowest level and least specific for purchased goods and services in GHGP's Scope 3 calculation guidance.
Do you have any concerns that your users might shortcut the work to produce high quality estimates of their Scope 3 emissions when you have made it so easy to get lower quality estimates?
As a second angle on this, do you have any accuracy or uncertainty estimates for the CO2e values a user receives? Let's say my company goes to a supermarket one month and buys $1000 worth of beef, and the next month buys $1000 worth of lentils from the same store. The GHG impacts of these purchases are (in reality) entirely different, but your API would tell me the emissions are the same. I know this line-item accounting is a massive challenge, but it seems there is an equal risk of green-washing as brown-washing here. This might be acceptable at the aggregate level but potentially harmful and very inaccurate at the individual level. Is there sufficient information returned from the API for your users to communicate data quality in a way aligned with the GHGP reporting standard?
Second line of questioning - GHGP guidance says companies must re-account historic emissions when data becomes available that significantly change estimated emissions. Would your API be compatible with this requirement? The Docs are locked off and the example on the homepage doesn't show any time component (presumably Uber's data would be different for 2022 than 2020).
Some disclosure: I work at the World Resources Institute with many colleagues who co-authored the GHGP guidance, though I have very low association with that project. I am acting on my own here.
by YeGoblynQueenne on 7/21/22, 1:19 PM
There's been some discussion about the accuracy of environmental footprint calculators. In particular, there are concnerns that such calculations don't take into account the consequences of choices made to reduce one's footprint, which may end up increasing, rather than decreasing, emissions.
For a brief introduction see:
Environmental footprint calculators have one big flaw we need to talk about
https://theconversation.com/environmental-footprint-calculat...
And in particular some research cited in the article, like:
Using Attributional Life Cycle Assessment to Estimate Climate-Change Mitigation Benefits Misleads Policy Makers
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.12074
Is your company aware of this discussion? If so, what are your plans to address those concerns?
by benbristow on 7/20/22, 2:39 PM
by WalterBright on 7/20/22, 11:33 PM
What's the easy, accurate, and fruitful way? Toting up the amount of fuel that comes out of refineries and coal mines multiplied by its carbon content.
Then, tax it, which will provide a disincentive for all uses that burn that fuel.
by Fiahil on 7/21/22, 8:37 AM
Actually, you don't "know" that, and the tCO2e for every single step in the supply chain is highly dependent on suppliers and situations. You can find an average for manufacturing a single glass bottle in Stockholm, and its shipping to Germany. But what if you used a small, low-carbon, shipping company instead of the regular transit options ? You would not know the proper tCO2e for that unless you already have specific data about this small shipping supplier.
It's completely recursive and mostly information-incomplete.
by WalterBright on 7/21/22, 3:09 AM
"Look at this lead pencil. There’s not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all. The wood from which it is made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington. To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel. To make steel, it took iron ore. This black center—we call it lead but it’s really graphite, compressed graphite—I’m not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South America. This red top up here, this eraser, a bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya, where the rubber tree isn’t even native! It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the British government. This brass ferrule? [Self-effacing laughter.] I haven’t the slightest idea where it came from. Or the yellow paint! Or the paint that made the black lines. Or the glue that holds it together. Literally thousands of people co-operated to make this pencil. People who don’t speak the same language, who practice different religions, who might hate one another if they ever met! When you go down to the store and buy this pencil, you are in effect trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those thousands of people. What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to make this pencil? There was no commissar sending … out orders from some central office. It was the magic of the price system: the impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate, to make this pencil, so you could have it for a trifling sum."
https://thenewinquiry.com/milton-friedmans-pencil/
It's a hopeless task. You're never going to get an accurate accounting of carbon footprints by looking at the end result. Not a chance.
by onion2k on 7/21/22, 7:51 AM
Presumably you can also measure the carbon footprint of buying carbon removal credits using Bend, and pay to remove that carbon, and measure the carbon footprint of buying those carbon removal credits, and so on forever...
by thomasmost on 7/26/22, 7:20 PM
by harrisonjackson on 7/20/22, 2:53 PM
It would be neat if carbon footprint could be translated to some more humanized unit. Like trees or global warming degrees or idk.
Also, it seems like some products at companies would be more carbon friendly. Would be nice if you could categorize the spending within a bank line item. Naive example… I bought a $10 reusable cup from my local coffee shop so that every time I shop there I am not using a styrofoam cup so let me tweak how that impacts my carbon footprint. That way I can still get coffee and feel good about doing so in a conscientious way. I’m sure there are similar big company examples, too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by qikInNdOutReply on 7/22/22, 6:51 AM
And that kids is how you not only not solve a problem, but introduce a bureaucratic feeld good layer that actually accelerates the problems.
Easier solution would be to just compute industrial product logetivity, aka how long it lasts as a usefull entity and tax accordingly. That would change things up, to reward a car lasting 40 years.
by enviclash on 7/20/22, 5:52 PM
by jdpigeon on 7/20/22, 4:29 PM
by l1n on 7/20/22, 2:24 PM
by bradhe on 7/20/22, 3:30 PM
by Heleana on 7/21/22, 10:43 AM
by tmp_anon_22 on 7/20/22, 6:20 PM
by totetsu on 7/20/22, 3:09 PM
by Snoozus on 7/20/22, 6:11 PM
by lancewiggs on 7/21/22, 11:55 AM
by parkerjamie1993 on 7/20/22, 3:36 PM
by dyeje on 7/20/22, 5:20 PM
by baxuz on 7/21/22, 2:41 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J9LOqiXdpE
Carbon offsets are a scam:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIezuL_doYw
Hearing people talk about these give me the same vibes as techbros talking about stocks and crypto.
by rob_c on 7/20/22, 5:26 PM
Companies would be better investing in encouraging people to behave better on compus if they were serious, and I mean by actually investing to make using eco friendly things pleasent, not using brown paper to give printouts to clients or having some guy who shouts about the wrong paper going in the wrong bin all the time.
Companies should buy things that people want that produce less waste (yes this then drives cost up and profits down), consolidating physical services (it, printing, office space etc.) and using recycled products by preference (again good recycled paper is not brown toilet paper and can even be given to clients). And when companies start doing this rather than individuals it has a knock on effect on the market and affordability.
And finally, I'm sorry, I fail to understand why anyone needs to pay to be told this.