The Ecobahn Carbon Footprint Calculator is a free tool created for eCommerce retailers to calculate their carbon footprints from logistics. Available now for Adobe Magento Commerce.
Every eCommerce order has a carbon footprint from logistics. Moving packages quickly, across large distances, takes a significant amount of energy. The result is a large amount of carbon released into the atmosphere, creating a significant environmental footprint from eCommerce orders.
With a larger percentage of consumers moving online, this footprint is set to increase. As the impacts of climate change become more prevalent, many businesses will want to take steps to offset their carbon footprint. Future government regulation will also make environmental impact assessments a standard business reporting requirement.
The Ecobahn Carbon Calculator provides eCommerce retailers with a free tool to calculates these carbon emissions, allowing businesses to accurately report their carbon footprint from logistics.
The tool is available now for Adobe Magento Commerce retailers.
Logistics Carbon Footprint Calculator: How Does It Work?
The Ecobahn Carbon Footprint Calculator calculates the carbon footprint for every order you ship to your customers.
By taking the warehouse address, combined with the shipping destination, our tool uses a detailed algorithm to calculate the logistics method and route. This data is then used to provide a detailed estimate of the carbon footprint required to ship individual customer orders.
- Warehouse location used as the origin
- Shipping address used as the destination
- Our algorithm calculates the logistics route, including changing transport types
- Total distance calculated (per transport type) for every order
- Algorithm utilises carbon emission data on a per KG, per KM, per transport method basis.
- Carbon footprint calculated for every order
- Combining order line data, carbon footprint data is aggregated by date and shipping location
More Than Just Offsets
There are many tools available to offset carbon footprints. Our issue with many of these tools is they don’t actually give eCommerce businesses any useable data regarding their carbon footprint.
A wide range of merchants across the eCommerce Logistics, Payments and Platform industry are now providing options for automatic offsets. Schemes range from Sendle to Adyen automatically pay for carbon credits so retailers can offer “carbon neutral” shipping to consumers.
This is an amazing development and something we fully support. The gap however is that offsetting is not a solution to the global climate change issue. Businesses need to have a detailed knowledge of their carbon footprint and work out long-term solutions to reduce this. Offsetting is not enough.
Most offset tools also just provide a very rough estimate of the cost to offset using high-level assumptions and estimates. When reporting on revenue, tax, returns etc, making rough estimates is not acceptable, so why should reporting on carbon footprints be any different.
The Ecobahn Carbon Footprint Calculator looks to address this by providing eCommerce retailers with a free tool to calculate the carbon footprint created from shipping eCommerce orders. This provides businesses with the baseline data they require to analyse, quantify, monitor, and most importantly reduce their carbon footprint from logistics.
Future Ecobahn Carbon Footprint Calculator
Making carbon data more accessible to eCommerce retailers is phase 1 of the Ecobahn Carbon Footprint Calculator.
Future updates will look to utilise this data to provide eCommerce retailers with a variety of tools to both offset, and in turn, begin to reduce the carbon footprint from logistics.
Alongside these product enhancements, the tool will be made more widely available across other eCommerce platforms.
Further Reading: Ecobahn Packaging Recycling Instructions Generator. Read More