Offset the carbon footprint of online purchases with one click. That’s what it promises Stripe Climate, a Stripe payments platform tool recently available globally, after its launch in the US in October 2020. The problem of sustainable ecommerce has emerged with increasing force in the last year, with the world population in lockdown and the exponential growth of online purchases. A problem that greatly interests consumers, who are often willing to wait longer and choose shipping with less impact (such as the “unhurried delivery” option of Amazon, which sometimes even offers a small economic compensation for the wait). Or, even, willing to contribute from their own pockets to reduce the carbon footprint associated with the logistics of their purchase.
Unlike ecommerce or tools that ask the user for a voluntary contribution (think of Zalando) to offset the emissions caused by the purchase and shipment, with Stripe Climate the contribution passes from the consumer to the expense of the company itself. The businesses that adhere to Stripe Climate decide to allocate a percentage of their revenues to the development of technologies for the removal of CO2. The Stripe Climate formula is intuitive, easy to access for companies and very profitable in terms of image. In fact, with each online purchase, the consumer at the time of payment will see the disclaimer of the percentage of his purchase devolved to the climatic cause.
Projects supported by Stripe (which does not take commissions and allocates 100% of the funds to development) are selected with the support of a team of academics and scientists. Stripe itself acquired four select companies in May 2020, which are working towards CO2 removal. Between these, Climeworks is a Swiss company specializing in technologies to filter CO2 directly from the environment, while CarbonCure integrates CO2 into construction concrete, with a double effect: ecological, but also improving the material, which becomes more resistant to compression. Project Vesta instead, it uses the synergy between the strength of the ocean and olivine (a mineral) to trap CO2 in the form of limestone on the seabed, while Charm Industrial produces clean hydrogen for use as fuel.
Over 500 companies have joined the Stripe Climate initiative, 100 of which are European, and Stripe aims to expand the Climate initiative to the millions of companies that currently use the payment system to manage their e-commerce. Founded in 2011 in San Francisco, Stripe has also been active in Italy since 2018. More complex than a normal payment platform, it also offers billing tools, money transfers, creation and management of business models, both turnkey and customizable.