Chrome Add-On EcoCart Secures US$3M To Help Offset Your Online Shopping Emissions

Tech Startup EcoCart recently raised US$3M for its free-to-use browser extension that helps shoppers offset their carbon emissions at select merchant shops.

San Francisco-based EcoCart can be downloaded for free on the Google browser Chrome and helps users calculates the carbon footprint of their orders.

In its recent funding round, the company received support from Base10 Partners; PopSugar co-founder Brian Sugar’s early-stage venture fund and angel investors like Ben Jabbawy, the founder of Privy; VP of global partnerships at Klaviyo, Rich Gardner; the co-founder of Chubbie, Kyle Hency; the chair of Blue Bottle Coffee, Bryan Meehan and the co-founder of BarkBox, Carly Strife.

Launching in October last year, the platform has over 10,000 companies including Vans, Levi’s, Footlocker and Sephora EcoCart. When brands sign up, they pay a commission to EcoCart and in exchange, the tool drives traffic to their websites under a standard affiliate marketing model. A part of these profits are then used to help users offset their shopping emsions.

In addition to this, EcoCart provides a carbon accounting and offsetting tool for businesses as well and by using services like BlueSource and Climeco, it helps source and aggregate offset projects that organizations can finance.

Before this venture, sustainably-minded co-founders Peter Twomey and Dane Baker had founded a startup that provided rental outdoor equipment to help consumers avoid buying new products, in a bid to stem the waste from unnecessary production and consumption.

According to an interview with TechCrunch, Baker said that the platform was born out of their own experiences with shopping: “We live this problem ourselves. We realized it was incredibly difficult to maintain this sustainability ethos.”

EcoCart represents a solution that is helping reverse decades of harmful climate change. Base10 is proud to be partnering with the EcoCart founders as they continue to make carbon-neutral shopping the new checkout standard for industries including retail, micro mobility, food delivery, and more

Chris Zeoli, principal at Base10 Partners

In a statement, principal at investors Base10 Partners Chris Zeoli, said: “We believe EcoCart is reinventing how brands interact with their customers while also managing and addressing their environmental impact at scale. EcoCart represents a solution that is helping reverse decades of harmful climate change. Base10 is proud to be partnering with the EcoCart founders as they continue to make carbon neutral shopping the new checkout standard for industries including retail, micro-mobility, food delivery, and more.”

EcoCart is available as an e-commerce plug-in and browser extension, both of which assess certain factors of the order to calculate carbon footprints including material inputs to the item, shipping distance and weight of the package.

Once your carbon emissions are calculated, EcoCart offsets them by donating them to a carbon offsetting project of your choice such as forest protection missions in Massachusetts, supplying clean water to rural communities in Cambodia, help construct wind turbines in Turkey, and many more.

To date, using the tool, around a quarter of customers have offset their purchases at checkout leading to a total capture of approximately 25 million pounds of CO2.

Another browser plug-in that helps shoppers offset their emissions is TreeClicks, which has over 50,000 shops on the platform including huge names like Amazon, AliExpress, Airbnb, Expedia, Ikea, and Adidas. According to the company, if every online U.S. consumer would use this tool, the total funding would help finance a tree planting project for an area equivalent to the size of Ireland. 

Read about all the newest sustainability tech-for-good apps and tools here.  

Lead image courtesy of Shopify.