As we head into the holiday season it’s is a good time to take stock of the real cost of our annual feast of consumerism. Every gift and gadget we buy - no matter how discounted - comes with an environmental price tag, the sum total of the carbon dioxide generated from the manufacturing, packing and shipping of all those holiday treasures. I’ll leave it those with better math skills than me to calculate the carbon footprint of Christmas, but I have a pretty good idea that the number is somewhere between a lot and a helluva lot. 

So, what’s an eco-literate consumer to do? Aside from insisting on biodegradable packing peanuts and recyclable wrapping paper, is there anything else we can do to make Christmas a little more green? Actually, yes.

Earlier this year I spent a good deal of time working with Pop!Tech and eBay to further expand the conference’s carbon program.  The result is the Pop!Tech Carbon Initiative (PCI), an innovative e-commerce platform  that allows you to calculate your personal carbon emissions and purchase offsets (aka “carbon credits”) from three environmental and social development projects. 

Each of the projects featured in the Pop!Tech Carbon Initiative not only reduce carbon emissions, they are contributing to the social and economic development of the communities they serve. For instance, the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) is working to install a solar-powered water irrigation system that will help rural villagers in Africa grow food during the dry season and increase their family income.  Paso Pacifico’s reforestation project is creating an ecological preserve in Nicaragua, restoring the bio-diversity of the region and providing sustainable job opportunities to the local population.  In short, these projects are not only helping combat climate change, they are fundamentally improving the lives of people in those communities.

This Wired article gives more detail about the PCI (if you want more info regarding how we developed the initiative or how an organization might do something similar, drop me an email).  The Pop!Tech Carbon Initiative is open through the end of year, so this holiday season, take a minute to measure your carbon shoe size and in addition to the postman and the newspaper boy, consider adding planet Earth to your holiday list.