Frequently Asked Questions

Carbon Off is an easy way for employers to show their employees they care about the environment by offsetting their employees personal carbon footprints.

That means you’re offsetting more than just the footprint of your employees' work, you’re offsetting the footprint of their lives. Their homes, their pets, travel, groceries, hobbies, the whole lot of it. Just like you may provide healthcare for the whole person (not just the part of them that comes to work) or provide a retirement contribution, Carbon Off enables you to eliminate the net impact they have as an individual living in a complex economy.

It couldn’t be easier. You just input the number of employees you’d like to offset and the percentage of their footprint you’d like to offset, and we’ll provide you with the pricing. All you have to do now is complete the checkout process, and voilà, you’re now offsetting your team.

At 100% for each employee, you’re offsetting 15 metric tonnes per year. At 50% 7.5 tonnes, and at 10% 1.5 tonnes. Every bit helps.

We use the US population average to calculate your employees' footprint, which is about 15 tonnes (or 16 imperial tons). We do this for a couple of reasons.

• Most calculators require you to know several data points on each employee from the type of vehicle they have, how their home is heated, how many therms and kwH they use, etc. Most of us don’t have this information on hand.
• Even taking into account all of this information, about 80% of the working population has a similar footprint—so similar that it only costs about $5 per month more to offset a 90th-percentile footprint vs. a 10th-percentile footprint. Our aim is to make sure perfect isn’t the enemy of good. (We believe it's better to do something positive now, rather than to put it off and wait to calculate it precisely, especially when many people will put it off indefinitely.)

This is one of the reasons we offer several offset levels. From 100% to as little as 10%. Something is better than nothing.

Our stance is that it is better to overestimate than underestimate. We know not everyone will offset their personal footprint, and the aggregate of a few dollars and cents across thousands of employees adds up and will help further compensate for people who may not care about their carbon footprint as much as you, dear reader.

After checking out, you’ll have access to log into your account which makes it easy for you to add or remove employees or change your offset level as you like.

You’re welcome to cancel at any time you like without any advance notice required. Please note we do not offer refunds or prorate for partial months. We officially retire carbon credits on your behalf, and once retired they cannot be reclaimed.

The carbon market, like many markets, fluctuates greatly. A major point of focus for our portfolio is to ensure that your costs remain fixed throughout the calendar year. At the end of the year we update the average footprint, and calculate the costs for the upcoming year and provide updates to all members with the option to continue their subscription or change or cancel as they desire.

Carbon Off’s portfolio consists of a number of projects selected to help globally in the fight against climate change. It is created in collaboration with George Washington University's Environmental and Energy Management Institute.

Additionally, our projects are further verified by third-party certification and trade primarily on the Verra and Gold Standard registries. You can read more about our portfolio and the projects we support here.

Offsets are an important tool in our toolbox to help fix the worst effects of climate change. And we’re going to need all of our tools for this job.

While we believe reduction and regulation are incredibly important tools as well, our stance is that by the time we, humanity, have reacted appropriately to the devastating effects of climate change it will be too late for reduction and regulation to save us. We’ll need highly effective offset programs and technologies to enable us to begin to undo the damage we’ve done.

Carbon Off was founded by Chris Yoko who originally wanted to offset his team’s personal carbon footprints at Yoko Co.

Carbon Off has already offset over 5,000 tonnes and has an ultimate goal to help offset 1 billion (1,000,000,000) metric tonnes, which is the equivalent of 20% of the United States’ total carbon emissions.

Honestly we’re impressed you made it this far. If you really don’t believe in it, then don’t invest in this for the climate benefit. Invest in it because your employees care.