You get what you pay for. And when you shop in retail stores, you’re often paying for an enormous environmental footprint. Zerofootprint is helping change that for Grassroots stores and Roots.com.

Zerofootprint is offsetting the deliveries of these two forward-looking companies.

“Zerofootprinting” deliveries make an already environmentally friendly way of shopping totally carbon-neutral.

If all shopping were done online, more than half of the traffic on the roads would be eliminated, as would the energy requirements of retail stores. Taking this into account, online shopping is the clear environmental choice, as it contributes a fraction of the climate-changing CO2.

But delivery trucks still burn fossil fuel. Zerofootprint makes Grassroots and Roots.com deliveries carbon-neutral by “offsetting” the emissions of those trucks. It is a fairly straightforward calculation to determine just how much CO2 the vehicles spew out. Once Zerofootprint knows how many tonnes have been emitted, they can arrange for an equal number to be offset.

The many strategies for offsetting carbon fall into two categories—cleaning up CO2 that has already been emitted, and preventing future emissions. Examples of the latter include investments in renewable energy, in efficiency measures, and clean technology for industry. If organizations that are moving towards a greener future in these ways can quantify and verify the carbon savings of their projects, they can sell credits. A credit is a tonne of unemitted carbon. When someone buys one of these credits, they are investing in a cleaner future.

But the only way to clean up the CO2 that is already heating up the atmosphere is to soak it up with trees. Trees “breathe” CO2, and turn it into oxygen. The problem is that only about 20% of the Earth’s original forests are still standing, so the planet is finding it hard to catch its breath. Meanwhile, we’re cutting down what remains at an alarming rate. Deforestation accounts for about 25% of greenhouse gas emissions.

Clearly we need trees, and we need them soon. So Zerofootprint is investing on Roots’ behalf of Grassroots and Roots.com in forestation projects that will soak up the same amount of carbon as the delivery trucks emit. And everyone, not just Grassroots and Roots.com customers, will be able to breathe a little easier.

“Our grandparents already had a great idea for cutting carbon dioxide emissions: it’s convenient, it saves time, it takes cars off the road, and it doesn’t cost taxpayers a cent. It’s time to bring it back,” says Deborah Kaplan, Executive Director at Zerofootprint. “Delivery is a perfect example of how offsetting should work—it’s making a smart environmental option even greener.”

For more information, or to book an interview with Zerofootprint, please contact Talia Klein at 416.365.7557 or talia@zerofootprint.net.