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Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint
69 points by tedpower on July 20, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 89 comments
Hi HN! We’re Ted and Thomas from Bend (https://bend.green/product). We help companies measure their carbon emissions by connecting to your corporate bank account (Brex, Mercury, or any other financial institution on Plaid) and then estimating the impact of each purchase.

Thomas and I found our way to this project via our background in fintech. Prior to Bend, I was a co-founder of Abacus (YC W14), a spend management company. At Abacus, we noticed that finance teams are increasingly paying attention to the climate impact of their purchase decisions, from travel policies, to cloud hosting, and beyond.

We believe this 'spend based' approach is the key to unlocking scalable carbon accounting. Today, most carbon accounting is manual, conducted once a year, and takes weeks or months to complete. It's like doing your taxes.

Fortunately, in the last couple years, we’ve started to reach a critical mass of good merchant data. It used to be that only a handful of companies tracked and disclosed their emissions. Today, 70%+ of Fortune 500 companies disclose their emissions in annual sustainability reports, and 1/3 of the entire global economy is now covered by a Science Based Target (and this coverage and quality is accelerating). The spend-based approach is fully automated and starts working the moment you connect your bank account.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that this emissions data is trapped in PDFs and blog posts, scattered across the internet. We aggregate and normalize this data by hand today, and plan to automate the process in the future.

Here’s how we measure the tCO2e (metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents) of your transactions: imagine that you get a $1,000 bill from Atlassian and want to know the carbon impact of that purchase. We know that for every $1,000 spent with Atlassian, there’s a 30.2 kg footprint — we multiply your bill total * (Atlassian’s annual emissions / Atlassian’s annual revenue) and return the tCO2e of that transaction.

Now imagine a similar calculation for each of the thousands of purchases your company makes every month / quarter / year. For merchants that don’t yet publish their emissions data, we fall back to category averages (e.g. for a Starbucks, we use the specific Starbucks carbon intensity factor, but for a mom-and-pop coffee shop that doesn’t disclose their greenhouse gas info, we use a generic benchmark ‘coffee shop’ factor).

To get a feel for the data we track, click on some of the corporate logos on https://bend.green/ — these aren’t customers; they’re examples of Bend’s merchant data. We have a climate scientist PhD on the team named Marion — we’d be happy to answer questions about our methodology!

Measuring and reducing your company’s emissions is of course good for the planet, but it also prepares your company for upcoming regulations and investor requirements. We help you create a 'climate profile' that you can use to close sales as the sustainable alternative to your competitors (you can share your info with prospects, customers, employees, investors, etc. — think of it like the climate equivalent of becoming SOC 2 compliant). And we just rolled out the ability to purchase carbon removal credits, powered by Patch, to offset some or all of your remaining emissions (optionally opt-in to automatic monthly purchasing).

Our pricing is $100 / month per company, and your company can try Bend for free for 14 days: https://app.bend.green/sign-up

Bonus points: if you’re building a fintech app, Bend data is also available via API (email us for API keys and docs). And if you work at a large / public company that already measures emissions, we encourage you to claim your company profile on Bend (for free!), and ask your vendors to track their emissions (after all, your vendors’ emissions become your emissions).

We’d love to hear your feedback and we’re excited to answer any questions!




I’m not an economist by profession but I suspect (and at some point want to try and model) that one’s carbon footprint is just a linear function of three variables: the amount of money spent, the fraction of all money that’s in active circulation in the economy, and the fraction of clean energy in the total economy.

If you pay google 100 bucks, and See how google spends that money: it saves some, pays off its employees, it spends on infra and then finally on actual energy. Saved money is never accessed if parked. What it gives to other companies and people will spawn the same split we created when we paid google ad infinitum. Money spent on infra can have an outsized environmental impact (plastic, concrete) but I’m hoping we can ignore it, and the Final expenditure is pure energy.

I feel like if you keep breaking down every Avenue parts of your 100 bucks goes into, it’ll eventually go to creating energy more or less. Even if you choose google because they use green energy, the employees who are paid by google will use amazon powered Netflix so it might not matter any more than what’s the fraction of green energy in the total economy.

Thus the only solution to reduce your carbon footprint is to pretty much just spend less money! But no one wants that do they? They just want to have their cake and also eat it so we are just doomed.

Been outlining this for an article for a while, comments , prior research and criticism appreciated! https://www.ramrajv.com/blog/how-to-truly-reduce-your-carbon...


I like the way you're thinkin'! That's a very "Bend-onomics" mindset, if I can be so presumptive.

That calculation is not dissimilar from what we do on a merchant-level, and I think it's a good, macro-comparison! For your three variables, we just substitute 1) transaction amount, 2) vendor revenue, and 3) vendor emissions, if that makes sense.

There are many reasons why it's important to do this at the merchant level, but one of the most exciting (from an economics perspective) is to amplify market pressure on high-emitters. In the future, you can imagine a green marketplace powered by Bend, where you can instantly comparison shop for providers with lower "carbon intensities" than those you're currently using.


Ya totally! Another way to think about it — in climate lingo, there are 3 types of emissions: First there are Scope 1 emissions, which are the emissions from burning fossil fuels directly (gas in your car, natural gas for your stove, etc.). Then there are Scope 2 emissions, which are from energy (you buy electricity from utilities, and those utilities use some percentage of non-renewable generation, like coal or natural gas). And finally Scope 3 is everything else — all the goods and services you buy, upstream and downstream.

But I think the point you guys are making, is that actually everything is Scope 1 emissions plus some number of hops. So if you buy gas, that's 0 hops. If you buy energy from your utility, and they use natural gas, that's 1 hop. If you buy an ice cream that was made in a factory powered by natural gas, that's 2 hops. And if you buy that ice cream with a cone, purchased by the ice cream shop, that was manufactured in a factory ... etc.

The problem is, consumers are often the ones who apply the pressure to address climate (don't wait for the fossil fuel companies to take this on themselves). And so we need to trace back all those upstream emissions, all the way back to those Scope 1 emissions, to really size the impact, and align incentives to decarbonize.

Historically, climate programs only focused on Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. But that only addresses maybe 20% of emissions for most companies. This is why it's critical to consider the impact of all the goods and services your company purchases.


> consumers are often the ones who apply the pressure to address climate (don't wait for the fossil fuel companies to take this on themselves)

Possibly, but equally consumers have not cried out for nuclear power for the last 40 years in most countries, which would've annihilated so much coal use. Consumers can more recently be won over by nice packaging and messages if they can afford a product that has green PR, which is great, but that's really minimal.


At least my suggestion is that the more effective way to reduce emissions (given we are not gonna go fully green for 80 years probably) is to just spend less. Park more of the money you make. Make Even more money and park it more.

Economically that might be the worst but environmentally that might be the best. The pandemic lockdowns kinda proved that as well.

Having said that your approach isn’t mutually exclusive. Even this dimensional balance method still suggests if more of our economy goes green then it’s better. So if your endeavor can shame more orgs to go green then great.


Unfortunately 'spend less' is not by itself a viable strategy for most growing companies. Companies need to invest in their growth. But companies can instead shift their spend from higher 'carbon intensity' goods and services to lower carbon intensity goods and services. E.g. if you need to buy a vehicle, buy an electric vehicle. Or if you need to rent office space, rent well-insulated efficient office space. Or if you need cloud hosting, select the greenest cloud and the greenest region. Or if you need to meet with a prospective customer, maybe do it over Zoom vs. getting on a plane. We try to help you prioritize that list of lower-carbon options.


> I’m not an economist by profession but I suspect (and at some point want to try and model) that one’s carbon footprint is just a linear function of three variables: the amount of money spent, the fraction of all money that’s in active circulation in the economy, and the fraction of clean energy in the total economy.

On average, it is true by definition (at least, if one holds that all activity in some way supports personal consumption) that carbon footprint from consumption is (global carbon output) × (personal consumption) / (global consumption).

It sounds like your proposed hypotheses essentially rephrases this.

> Thus the only solution to reduce your carbon footprint is to pretty much just spend less money!

In the short-term, sure. What spending a premium on things that reduce carbon footprint in normal narrow analysis (but which force the reductions in the short term to be someone else's increases who aren't paying the premium) does isn't actually reducing the near term footprint of the whole economy, it increases the economic incentive for production models which reduce the footprint per unit output.


As a non-economist also, I am quite sure moving $1 of your yearly expenses away from CO2 heavy suppliers will encourage the market to find other solutions.

What you spend your money on matters, even more than voting.


I agree with your general premise.

10% of companies advertising that they use 100% green energy, while the other 90% of society uses 0% is no better than the government forcing 10% of all energy to be zero carbon.

Economist agree that carbon taxes work, but they work at every level not just the first time it's spent which amplifies the effect.

However, I think I disagree on two important things:

a) fixing climate change is the cheaper option. We're "doomed" only to the extent that system incentives drive us to do the wrong, more expensive thing

b) more info can only help that case, even at the margin.

Voting is the most powerful way for most people to act. Voting with your wallet helps too.


Fossil fuels are responsible for about 60% of greenhouse gases emissions (in CO2 equivalent), the remaining 40% being split between: deforestation, farming and various chemical processes (to make concrete, to reduce iron ore, to make fertilizer from natural gas, etc.). Your equation seems to solely focus on these 60%, so it's quite incomplete, given that we also need to get rid of the remaining 40%.

For example methane and nitrous oxide, two extremely potent greenhouse gases, are mostly by-product of agriculture/cattle rearing: methane from cows and rice fields, nitrous oxide from the usage of fertilizers (from memory, I might be wrong).

Another example: the chemical process behind concrete production (CaCO3 -> CaO + CO2) emits more CO2 (about 4% of global emissions) than the world airplane fleet (about 2% of global emissions). That's without accounting for the energy necessary to trigger the chemical process, usually coming from fossil fuel...


>Thus the only solution to reduce your carbon footprint is to pretty much just spend less money! But no one wants that do they? They just want to have their cake and also eat it so we are just doomed.

I do. I've never been more frugal in my life (almost an hermit now) and yet I'm earning >€200K/y and have over $4M in $TSLA at ~35 y-o. I don't spend because I know any spending would end up adding pollution more than satisfy me.

I could give all the assets now though but I'm not sure which organization would best use it to speed up the transition to sustainable energy and prevent biodiversity collapse (to many players in clean energy don't care about the latter and even would work to worsen the situation).


The fact that YOUR suppliers are reducing CO2 emissions matters.

If enough people did that, every supplier would eventually reduce CO2.

Energy can be produced with very little CO2 emissions, like solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear.


Hey, this is an interesting and emerging market, what will maybe be called 'carbon analytics' or 'GHG analytics'. There are definitely lots of opportunities in this space.

Without letting perfect be the enemy of good here... I have some questions.

It seems nice to have a backstop for what GHGP calls "Corporate-level data" which is the lowest level and least specific for purchased goods and services in GHGP's Scope 3 calculation guidance.

Do you have any concerns that your users might shortcut the work to produce high quality estimates of their Scope 3 emissions when you have made it so easy to get lower quality estimates?

As a second angle on this, do you have any accuracy or uncertainty estimates for the CO2e values a user receives? Let's say my company goes to a supermarket one month and buys $1000 worth of beef, and the next month buys $1000 worth of lentils from the same store. The GHG impacts of these purchases are (in reality) entirely different, but your API would tell me the emissions are the same. I know this line-item accounting is a massive challenge, but it seems there is an equal risk of green-washing as brown-washing here. This might be acceptable at the aggregate level but potentially harmful and very inaccurate at the individual level. Is there sufficient information returned from the API for your users to communicate data quality in a way aligned with the GHGP reporting standard?

Second line of questioning - GHGP guidance says companies must re-account historic emissions when data becomes available that significantly change estimated emissions. Would your API be compatible with this requirement? The Docs are locked off and the example on the homepage doesn't show any time component (presumably Uber's data would be different for 2022 than 2020).

Some disclosure: I work at the World Resources Institute with many colleagues who co-authored the GHGP guidance, though I have very low association with that project. I am acting on my own here.


Hey, good questions! You know your stuff.

Re: do you have any concerns that your users might shortcut the work to produce high quality estimates of their Scope 3 emissions when you have made it so easy to get lower quality estimates?

> I think the high order bit here is that 99%+ of companies don't measure their emissions at all. This is for a good reason — measuring your emissions historically has been quite labor-intensive. Even for large companies, there is always a 'long tail' of 'Scope 3 goods and services' transactions that are hard to measure. Our goal is to create a scalable solution so that a much larger share of companies are able to participate.

Re: your grocery store example —

> This is a fair point. Our main belief is that realtime, actionable data trumps perfectly attributed data, if perfectly attributed data requires a bottoms-up manual model. The advantage of the spend-based approach is that (1) it's realtime, and (2) it aligns incentives at the company level. The holy grail, however, would be itemized spend data (level 3 data), where you could factor in the emissions of your specific line-items. Unfortunately, that data is nearly impossible to get (yet). Maybe that's Bend 2.0 :)

Re: re-accounting historical emissions —

> Yes! We use the emissions 'factor' that most closely matches the transaction date. So for example, if you bought a Starbucks coffee in 2020, we would use the 2020 Starbucks factor, and if you bought a Starbucks in 2021, we would use the 2021 Starbucks factor. If Starbucks is late to publish their 2022 report, we would recalculate the emissions when the info is updated. For our category fallbacks, we also take currency / region into consideration.

Happy to chat more, either with you or the WRI folks! Thanks for the questions.


Thanks for the responses - I think I typically agree with your approach that there are substantial benefits to getting people to crawl or walk rather than making them run.

On your belief that actionable data _trumps_ perfectly attributed data, I'm not entirely convinced. I think actionable data _complements_ attributable data. But you need the attributable data to accurately measure the impact and learn what specific actions caused that impact.

I think all companies want to make actions that are well-informed, 'the right choice', and have the potential to demonstrate it was 'the right choice'. My concern is that when someone takes a 'good action' such as replacing high intensity animal protein with low intensity plant protein there is no evidence from your side that it made any difference. You are divorcing the actual choice that was made from what is perceived as the outcome.

The dollars-to-emissions relationship is just not as simple as is being represented, and for those who are not specialists there might be a false sense of progress.

"We cut our daily emissions from transport by having employees purchase Uber rides in off-peak times."

"We cut our emissions for business travel by setting up a policy that flights must be purchased at least 2 months in advance."

"We cut our emissions from our regular food purchases by looking at the local newspaper for coupons and signing up for a customer loyalty account."

"Maybe we all should fly to Las Vegas (tickets are cheap) rather than have Linda fly to NYC (an expensive ticket)."

Each of these might be smart business choices, but they have absolutely no real world effect on emissions that should be attributable to a company, but that isn't what the company is being told.

As a first pass to estimate sense of scale and where to look into unsustainable practices and prioritize better data collection, Bend seems to be valuable.


Thanks, ya, fair points — as orgs level-up and get more sophisticated, you might start to use Bend as the first pass, identifying hot-spots, and then doing deeper dives on the specific 'SKUs' that are being purchased.


Hello and good luck with your business.

There's been some discussion about the accuracy of environmental footprint calculators. In particular, there are concnerns that such calculations don't take into account the consequences of choices made to reduce one's footprint, which may end up increasing, rather than decreasing, emissions.

For a brief introduction see:

Environmental footprint calculators have one big flaw we need to talk about

https://theconversation.com/environmental-footprint-calculat...

And in particular some research cited in the article, like:

Using Attributional Life Cycle Assessment to Estimate Climate-Change Mitigation Benefits Misleads Policy Makers

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.12074

Is your company aware of this discussion? If so, what are your plans to address those concerns?


For all this talk about climate change & global warming, green-washing companies sure do seem to be making a lot of dollar.


Yes, green-washing is definitely a problem. There is an incredibly wide variance of quality among carbon offsets, from dubious avoidance offsets priced at $2 per ton of CO2-equivalent emissions (tCo2e) to actually sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and sequestering it below the earth for $600-1000 per tCo2e.

At Bend, we are trying to really apply pressure on the market to be real about going "net-zero." Our offsets package is priced at $100 per ton, which is still surprisingly affordable for a lot of small companies. We blend that package across reforestation projects (low-cost) and true carbon removal project (high-cost) to offset a company's emissions, in order to funnel investment towards those more expensive operations. This is important so that companies like Charm Industrial and Climeworks can increase their efficiency and bring the price-point of carbon removal down.

And while $100/tCo2e might sound expensive, our thesis is that it's still remarkably affordable, especially for small companies who factor it in early on. This program is also opt-in, so you can start out with Bend just to measure your emissions and then decide about offsetting later... but for us, for example, our "Carbon Bill" hovers between just $25 to a $100 per month. Barely doubles the cost of the base subscription!


Ya I hear you, our goal is to combat greenwashing in a few ways. We cover total emissions (vs. cherry-picking categories of emissions). We incentivize companies to take action today (vs. vague 2040 or 2050 goals). And to the degree that carbon credits are part of your strategy, we push for very high cost-per-tCO2e removal credits ($100 / tCO2e) vs. low quality $5-$10 cost-per-tCO2e avoidance credits.


Bluntly, this is a completely fruitless, hopelessly inaccurate, and unnecessarily expensive way to measure and deal with CO2 emissions.

What's the easy, accurate, and fruitful way? Toting up the amount of fuel that comes out of refineries and coal mines multiplied by its carbon content.

Then, tax it, which will provide a disincentive for all uses that burn that fuel.


We're huge supporters of a carbon tax, but there are significant challenges, both technical and political. If we had perfect information and the political will, I think the approach you describe would be great—in the meantime, unfortunately, the market needs tools like Bend.

I actually wrote a blog post on the subject, if you're curious: https://bend.green/blog/the-path-to-a-carbon-tax


"It’s a relatively simple idea: corporate CO2e emissions are tracked and companies are charged some flat rate of dollars per kilogram."

As I mentioned, tracking and measuring emissions is hopelessly complicated. It's far easier to tax the carbon content of the fuel where the fuel is produced.

As for taxing, we already tax gasoline (rather heavily). I don't really understand why taxing the carbon content is resisted so strongly. Taxing the carbon content would also do things like make natural gas more attractive than coal, because ng has twice the energy in it per carbon atom.

As for the amount of the tax, one starts out with a small carbon tax, then gradually increase it until the CO2 emissions go down. This also gives the market time to adapt.

It is impossible to determine the carbon footprint of a mere pencil, let alone some large business operation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32175325


One is grass roots and the other top down.


> imagine that you get a $1,000 bill from Atlassian and want to know the carbon impact of that purchase. We know that for every $1,000 spent with Atlassian, there’s a 30.2 kg footprint

Actually, you don't "know" that, and the tCO2e for every single step in the supply chain is highly dependent on suppliers and situations. You can find an average for manufacturing a single glass bottle in Stockholm, and its shipping to Germany. But what if you used a small, low-carbon, shipping company instead of the regular transit options ? You would not know the proper tCO2e for that unless you already have specific data about this small shipping supplier.

It's completely recursive and mostly information-incomplete.


Here's a challenge. Determine the carbon footprint of a pencil. Milton Friedman writes:

"Look at this lead pencil. There’s not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all. The wood from which it is made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington. To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel. To make steel, it took iron ore. This black center—we call it lead but it’s really graphite, compressed graphite—I’m not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South America. This red top up here, this eraser, a bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya, where the rubber tree isn’t even native! It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the British government. This brass ferrule? [Self-effacing laughter.] I haven’t the slightest idea where it came from. Or the yellow paint! Or the paint that made the black lines. Or the glue that holds it together. Literally thousands of people co-operated to make this pencil. People who don’t speak the same language, who practice different religions, who might hate one another if they ever met! When you go down to the store and buy this pencil, you are in effect trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those thousands of people. What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to make this pencil? There was no commissar sending … out orders from some central office. It was the magic of the price system: the impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate, to make this pencil, so you could have it for a trifling sum."

https://thenewinquiry.com/milton-friedmans-pencil/

It's a hopeless task. You're never going to get an accurate accounting of carbon footprints by looking at the end result. Not a chance.


And we just rolled out the ability to purchase carbon removal credits, powered by Patch, to offset some or all of your remaining emissions (optionally opt-in to automatic monthly purchasing).

Presumably you can also measure the carbon footprint of buying carbon removal credits using Bend, and pay to remove that carbon, and measure the carbon footprint of buying those carbon removal credits, and so on forever...


haha indeed — but actually, this is kind of the point — purchasing carbon removal credits is just like any other business purchase, but with a negative emissions factor. When you purchase carbon removal credits on Bend, it shows up as just another transaction, but with negative CO2e.


Just wanted to update the Hacker News community here that we just launched on Product Hunt as well! Y'all asked a ton of amazing questions here and if you wouldn't mind checking this out as well and engaging if you're so moved, every little bit helps! Thanks <3

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/bend-3


What’s the carbon footprint of $100 bend subscription?

It would be neat if carbon footprint could be translated to some more humanized unit. Like trees or global warming degrees or idk.

Also, it seems like some products at companies would be more carbon friendly. Would be nice if you could categorize the spending within a bank line item. Naive example… I bought a $10 reusable cup from my local coffee shop so that every time I shop there I am not using a styrofoam cup so let me tweak how that impacts my carbon footprint. That way I can still get coffee and feel good about doing so in a conscientious way. I’m sure there are similar big company examples, too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


We are offsetting all our emissions via the Bend Offsets Plan, so the carbon footprint of your $100 Bend subscription is credibly net-zero :)

And yes, line-item and other "level 3" data is very exciting to us techies—unfortunately it's also really difficult to access! One of the reasons we like the Bend model is that it simplifies/abstracts away from that by looking at your total contribution to a company's bottom-line as the source of truth for emissions, which prevents a kind of "line item greenwashing."

But yes, in the future it would be nifty to sync in level 3 data from receipts or something to factor that into our calculations!


Anyone can translate carbon footprint into trees or whatever. The important part is having a metric so you can make sure it's going down, not up.


+1!


And then we travell to some third world country to buy "forrest planted" certificates from some corrupt official, to return that imaginary crime number down to zero with imaginary good deeds.

And that kids is how you not only not solve a problem, but introduce a bureaucratic feeld good layer that actually accelerates the problems.

Easier solution would be to just compute industrial product logetivity, aka how long it lasts as a usefull entity and tax accordingly. That would change things up, to reward a car lasting 40 years.


Climate economist here: great and brave idea. Just to mention, emissions data from blogs can only be too sloppy. What data is the most difficult to find in particular? Happy to think and help.


Hi! Ya we only use full GHGP inventory data. Honestly, the hardest data to gather is clean transaction data! The Brex API returns relatively clean data. Other banks and financial institutions, via Plaid, often have pretty messy merchant and category info. If I had a magic wand, it's actually the spend data I'd focus on — super clean, itemized transaction data would be amazing.


I'm quite worried about the viability of CO2 offset markets in the absence of legislative action from the US. Since the Supreme Court and Joe Manchin seem to have doomed our chances for stricter CO2 emissions regulation, what's going to incentive companies to purchase more offsets? Is there hope from Europe? China?


From a regulatory perspective, yes, there's a lot of pressure being generated in European markets. In the US, another thing we're starting to see is pressure from procurement managers at large companies like Salesforce. Since Salesforce is committed to a net-zero footprint, anyone selling software to Salesforce needs to at least report their emissions (we can help with that!)—and as more companies adopt similar policies, hopefully we'll see more market incentive to report, reduce, and offset


If any of that spend is at a cloud provider, it's an opaque, highly variable blob. How do you plan to deal with that?


Ya good point — our approach is always spend-based, so the way we'd calculate cloud spend is your AWS / GCP bill * the AWS / Google carbon intensity (what we call a 'factor'). It is true that some data center regions use cleaner energy vs. others. We consider the spend-based approach, at a minimum, a good first pass. The greener the cloud you use, the lower the emissions. And then you can further optimize within your cloud provider.

Another note — most cloud emissions only factor in the energy footprint ('scope 2' in technical greenhouse gas inventory terms). We believe this significantly undercounts emissions, because it ignores the capital expenditure of building the facility, buying all the machines, etc. The great thing about the spend-based approach is all this overhead is factored in. (BTW, Google Cloud Platform just started to layer in some of this 'scope 3' operational overhead data, but I believe AWS still ignores it, significantly undercounting emissions).


Man, I grew up in a city called Bend and my family still lives there. Your company name is really tripping me out.


Bend, Oregon?

I'm from Seattle, but I've actually wanted to visit Bend for a while. Seems like a nice river town


Exactly. It's an amazing place. Definitely go visit it.


Quite simply, this is a pointless, inaccurate, and expensive method for determining CO2 emissions.


We have a large database of carbon intensity factors generated using government data from two different sources (the EPA and Exiobase). Comparing our merchant specific factors to those industry standards, you might be surprised by how accurate it is.


Will you make a contractual promise that you will NEVER sell the financial data that you scoop up?


Absolutely. Even though we have a fintech background and we're tackling carbon accounting from the angle of spend, we know how sensitive revenue and budget data are. Our business is firmly in mapping the carbon graph; we'll never sell financial insights.


What about financial data?


We will never sell financial data.


Are there any emerging standards or agreement on exactly how to measure carbon footprint?


Ya, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol — https://ghgprotocol.org/ — is the universally accepted way for companies to measure their emissions. It's been around for about a decade.

That being said, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol reporting has been pretty inconsistent in the past. Companies cherry-pick and leave out important info, or define their 'reporting boundary' in inconsistent ways. One of our goals is to help 'debug' these inconsistencies.

Lucas Joppa from Microsoft laid this out quite well here: https://www.ted.com/talks/lucas_joppa_how_to_fix_the_bugs_in...


Thanks I'm joining a start up in this space soon too. Good luck.


Exciting! Would love to hear more about it and chat all things climate-tech in our Discord server if you're interested: https://discord.gg/muGxr24U

Good luck to you too!


So what's the carbon impact of paying employees? Is there a Co2 kg/$ ratio?


We treat payroll as zero emissions. The responsibility boundary of a company doesn't include the personal consumption decisions of employees. The spend-based approach makes this pretty straightforward — if the company is buying, those are company emissions. If an individual is buying, those are individual emissions.


Not trying to put you in a 'gotcha' situation, but GHGP Scope 3 Category 7 (Employee Commuting) is entirely related to employee actions outside the bounds of the company. Commutes and also home-office energy choices (heating, cooling, use of renewable energy credits, ...) are typically chosen (and paid for) by individuals outside of work but are components of an organization's value chain.


ya, that's right, good point. For complete GHGP inventory reporting, customers need to estimate employee commuting separately (and we're happy to help with that; it's usually a pretty straightforward calculation, though gathering the employee info takes some doing).

Setting the GHGP aside, my own personal opinion about how we interpret GHGP data is that it's important to make a clear distinction between upstream emissions and downstream emissions. For example, 'use of sold products' (Category 11) is also not something you can determine from spend data. But I'd argue that 'use of sold products' is a very different thing than upstream emissions (even though they're all lumped under Scope 3).

Commuting is a less clear-cut case, but I think of commuting (that is paid for by employees) as more of a downstream emissions category.

We wrote up some notes on this here: https://bend.green/faq/downstream-emissions


Good question! We don't currently consider payroll a carbon emitting activity. Generally we think of salary as paying exclusively for human-hours.

In contrast, if your company paid for your metro card or reimbursed for mileage or gas on your commute, we would estimate the carbon intensity for those expenses.


So replacing a 100k employee by a 10k cloud service would increase a companys co2 balance? Seems counterintuitive, no?


I don't understand what you're saying. Replacing a 10k cloud service with 100k of private server equipment would probably reduce a company's co2 balance.


I meant this turned the other direction lol


https://cogo.co/ has been doing something like this for a while.


I was introduced to Ben recently and they are doing some pretty amazing stuffs. They are now laser focused on the UK Banks.


This is awesome! Great stuff guys


Thank you! There's not a ton of activity yet but if you wanna hang out with us and chat all things climate-tech, here's the link to our Discord: https://discord.gg/muGxr24U


How’d you arrive at this pricing? This seems like too expensive (and frankly irrelevant) for small companies and absurdly cheap for a large enterprise.


We picked a price that opens up the addressable market beyond late stage and public companies.

As startups, you have an unfair advantage — it’s much easier to build good carbon habits early, vs. retooling your business after having already invested large amounts of capital in carbon-intensive practices and depreciating assets.

We do offer enterprise pricing for API access for larger customers.


Yes, $100/month is our Startup pricing. Enterprise customers have very different needs and multiple bank connections to manage, so we approach those case-by-case.


Carbon footprints are a scam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J9LOqiXdpE

Carbon offsets are a scam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIezuL_doYw

Hearing people talk about these give me the same vibes as techbros talking about stocks and crypto.


A corporate carbon footprint isn't a scam if it's calculated using primary data and according to the GHG Protocol standards - https://ghgprotocol.org/


+1, it also really depends on the offset (as to whether it's a scam or not)—like I talked about elsewhere, even our low-cost offset is a much more credible project than some of the credits frequently purchased by big companies.

If we don't start changing the standard for what's acceptable, who will, ya know?


Incidentally, do you have any advice or resources for assessing the credibility of carbon offsets (for purchase by individuals I suppose, not that it should make much difference)?


[flagged]


Name-calling, personal attacks, and flamewar will get you banned here, so please don't post like this. You can make your substantive points without any of that.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.


I see this point over and over again about how carbon footprint is a scam forced on citizens by companies, and it doesn't make any sense to me. Companies are made of people. If people didn't use a company's products, the company wouldn't exist. Seems like the folks making this point are just more invested in avoiding collective accountability, like they want some mythical powerful government to step in and force all the companies to solve the citizens problems for them while the citizens keep consuming whatever they want. It just seems totally backwards to me.


I'm sorry but your are wrong on this one. The carbon footprint is a scam because it is not made to change things but simply shift the blame on citizen Lamda when in fact citizen Lambda has nothing to do with it.

Its been proven time and time again that recycling as it has been sold to the world is a scam. To understand that you only need to look at the years 2019/2020 when China decided to not accept anymore plastic material for recycling. The reason is obvious, it does not work.

But its not news really. Governments and companies have known for decades that we were heading down the wrong path yet chose not to act.

If you want to stop climate change, there is a simple and easy solution. Ban fossil fuels. But that will send our civilization back to the dark ages.

What we should have done is make a plan and start the transition early but instead as always governments have waited and waited even though countless reports warned over the years that we were making things worse.

Alas, governments all around the world were just too happy to collect taxes on petrol/fuel and even encourage citizens to embrace technologies that turned out to have deadly side effects on the local population(see the Diesel scandal in France).

All the while the governments have been pocketing the money in their coffers never to be seen again and the investments in renewable energy have been delayed and/or cancelled(see Germany circa 2010 in response to Fukushima)

It's only in the last few months that most of Europe started waking up to the fact that burning fossil fuels was not going to be the way to go forward. Mind you, not because they all suddenly realized that we should really push renewable energy, no, it's only because the main supply of gas is about to be cut off.

Yet, somehow we see governments and companies turning around and say: You need to watch your electricity usage, you need to stop using plastic wrappers, plastic straws and what not, you need to drive less.

As if people have choice...

But people will make due with what they have. If we don't want people to use plastic straws, then lets ban them. Alas, once again the big companies are against that.

Mc Donald's famously rejected a ban on plastic straws when they could have been at the forefront of this fight and show the way, instead it chose it's bottom line.

Governments could have not incentivized car usage by building better and denser neighborhoods but instead we now have urban sprawl and god help you if you live on the country side and if you don't have a car.

So to sum it up I reject the fact that it is somehow my fault that climate change is happening. I reject the fact that I should try to calculate my own carbon footprint while airlines, car companies and governments just sit by and continue to spew more and more carbon in the atmosphere while I need to feel guilty because I bought some food in a plastic container.

You talk about collective accountability, I am more than happy to do my part when everyone does their part including big companies and governments.


The attitude presented here is very fatalist and not aligned with reality. The behaviours we engage in are as important for their direct outcomes as they are for their signals and influence. Recycling an individual plastic bottle may do very little to benefit the world directly by keeping that plastic out of landfill, but the influence the act of recycling has on your own behaviour and the behaviour of others can bubble up to bring about real change.

Progress comes about when people push for change, when they act according to their principles and desire, when people lead the way. If you sincerely care about a cause, if something really matters to you, then you should be willing to expend some of your energy on it.

You can pick any example of human progress and apply your line of thinking to it. “Why should I bother washing my hands when nobody else is?” “Why should I stop painting my house with lead when everybody else is painting their house with lead?”

Collective accountability doesn’t mean everybody takes accountability, collective accountability means everyone has accountability. You choose whether or not to take accountability. You’re choosing not to, so be it, but own that decision, don’t pretend that it’s the fault of someone else.


>> The attitude presented here is very fatalist and not aligned with reality.

No offense to you but Europe is in the middle of a heat wave currently and temperature records have been broken fairly recently. So no, I am not fatalist, I am a realist. I call a spade a spade. It is not debatable that all the issues that we are having now have been known for a least a few decades.

So this isn't a lack of foresight or that we were not warned. We knew and did nothing or almost nothing.

>> but the influence the act of recycling has on your own behavior and the behavior of others can bubble up to bring about real change.

Unless you can back up that claim, then there is nothing to say. Plastic recycling does not work because it is uneconomical. It is cheaper to produce plastic than to recycle it. Until that changes then plastic recycling is a waste of time and simply a feel good act that has been implemented to make people feel like they had an impact.

>> if you sincerely care about a cause, if something really matters to you, then you should be willing to expend some of your energy on it.

I care about the cause whether you think I am or not. What I don't care about is pretending to do something when we are not actually doing anything.

>> You can pick any example of human progress and apply your line of thinking to it. “Why should I bother washing my hands when nobody else is?"

I bother to wash my hands because it has an tangible effect on my quality of life by keeping me and my family safe from diseases.

Recycling a plastic bottle or taking a shorter shower is not going to save the world when governments around the world are dragging their feet and the biggest polluters out there can pollute as much as they want without consequences.

>> You’re choosing not to, so be it, but own that decision, don’t pretend that it’s the fault of someone else.

Give me a cheap electric car that I can buy second hand and make it easy to charge it at night and then I'll drive an EV. Unless you live in Norway or unless you own your own home, there is no way for someone who rents to charge their car on the street if they don't have a garage.

Force energy companies to sell a minimum at least 50% renewable energy and I'll be buying it.

Force the city councils around the world to improve the reliability and availability of public transport even on the country side, and I'll stop using my car.

This is a give and take situation. At the moment most citizens in the developed world are being hammered by inflation and a rising cost of living. Yet according to you, it seems only fair that we should shoulder most of the cost of the energy transition.

I don't think that's fair. Not when the various governments around the world are still subsidizing petroleum products, not when shipping companies can use the dirtiest fuel around to power their ships.

If you want people to change and people to make better decisions for the planet, people need to have options. At the moment those options are few and far between and mostly onerous.

Not every one can afford a model 3!


If you’re unwilling to make any sacrifice for the greater good then you’re asking the world to serve perfection to you without any effort on your part.

You can’t get a cheap second hand electric car that you can charge for free at your home? That’s unfortunate, but there are other options beyond “well whatever I’ll just get a petrol car then”.

Your government represents you, your government is not a nebulous self-sufficient entity that exists independent of you and your fellow country people. If your government isn’t doing enough, it’s up to you and the people around you to be a force for good, to do everything in your power to create change. Even if sometimes it feels fruitless, do it. Be the best you can be.

Also, the idea that you and I are shouldering the cost of the energy transition is completely ignorant to the realities of the world. The catastrophic disasters that we, the developed world, have created, are an order of magnitude worse in the global south than they will ever be for us. People are dying every day because of our choice to use fossil fuels, we are destroying the planet, your increased cost of living or exposure to the heat doesn’t come close to the suffering of people who are paying the price for our choices. Yes, this heatwave in Europe is painful, as is the cost of living going up, but perspective is important.


You can't fix systemic issues with individual choices.

That requires regulation and a system that can carry out those regulations.


Finish the thought, where do regulations come from?


From government intervention.


You are misinterpreting what I said but I am not going to repeat myself to reiterate my views which I have expressed pretty clearly in my previous response to you.

You completely forgot to address all my rebuttals to your arguments so I will chose to believe that you are arguing in bad faith at this point.

For the sake of closure let me respond to you and then we can leave it at that:

>> If you’re unwilling to make any sacrifice for the greater good then you’re asking the world to serve perfection to you without any effort on your part.

this is a complete misinterpretation of my argument. I am willing to make sacrifices that have an impact. Taking a shorter shower or recycling a plastic bottle will not change a thing until the biggest polluters are actually doing their part.

I am not sure how else I can explain it. It stands to reason that it makes more sense to tackle the biggest issues first, that is the shipping industry, the petroleum industry, the airlines and so on before asking people to sacrifice some of their little comforts like having a long shower or not drinking from plastic cups.

>> You can’t get a cheap second hand electric car that you can charge for free at your home? That’s unfortunate, but there are other options beyond “well whatever I’ll just get a petrol car then”.

Please do tell what those options are?

And while you are at it why don't you tell that to someone living on minimum wage on the country side where there is no public transport. And don't tell me that they should just move to a city when the cost of housing as increased by 30% within the last 2 years.

Once again, what's your proposal? Should they just bike or walk for 20km maybe twice a day?

You do realize that not everyone can afford a new or second hand electric car right?

>> Your government represents you, your government is not a nebulous self-sufficient entity that exists independent of you and your fellow country people. If your government isn’t doing enough, it’s up to you and the people around you to be a force for good, to do everything in your power to create change. Even if sometimes it feels fruitless, do it. Be the best you can be.

So I should spend my days shouting into the void and hoping that someone somewhere listens to me and my fellow citizens? Well, guess what? I have been there and done that. Unfortunately some of us don't have the luxury or the time to go on a crusade. I have many things going on in my life and time spent away from my family is not a luxury I can afford.

>> Also, the idea that you and I are shouldering the cost of the energy transition is completely ignorant to the realities of the world.

I definitely am shouldering the cost through higher taxes on petroleum products. Higher taxes on energy and higher cost of food and energy in general.

>> The catastrophic disasters that we, the developed world, have created, are an order of magnitude worse in the global south than they will ever be for us.

I never said that the developing countries will not have to bear the consequences of our actions. In fact I hope they realize that the developed countries have screwed them.

>> People are dying every day because of our choice to use fossil fuels, we are destroying the planet, your increased cost of living or exposure to the heat doesn’t come close to the suffering of people who are paying the price for our choices.

I agree with you. But where I disagree is that we have bigger fish to fry than worry if Joe blow's shower was 5 minutes long or 3 minutes.

It's like you are coming back from work or from running an errand and discover that your house is on fire. You don't stop by the mail box to check if your magazine has arrived, no, you run and grab a bucket or a hose and you try to extinguish the flames by yourself before the firefighters arrive.

My problem is that the current governments are too concerned about my meat consumption or the model of my car or the amount of plastic bottles I recycle while carefully avoiding rocking the boat with the big corporations that are responsible for orders of magnitude more pollution than than I could ever produce in 100 lifetimes. That's my problem.

If you choose to interpret this as me not caring then feel free to do so but you will have misunderstood my argument.

>> Yes, this heatwave in Europe is painful, as is the cost of living going up, but perspective is important.

Perspective is a luxury that few can afford. What good is perspective when you can't afford your rent or to heat your house in winter or when you can't feed your kids because the price of food has climbed 20% during the last 12 months?

Forgive me for saying so but from your responses you talk like someone who has a comfortable lifestyle. If that is the case then good for you but just so you know your point of view on these issues seems highly skewed and not representative of the majority of the population that is currently struggling to keep their heads above water in light of the rising cost of living.

On that note I wish you a good day.


You're a software engineer, you're in the upper echelon of the upper echelon, please don't try and appeal to some unearned sympathy. I am arguing that you, as a person of privilege, should do the best you can do to bring about the world you want to see. I would not have the same argument with a person living in poverty, I would not argue that someone struggling to survive should be concerned about their carbon footprint. Most people in Europe are not struggling to survive by global standards.

The obligation you and I have is very different, because you and I (and the others on this website) are in a position of privilege, we are in a position of power, our actions influence the lives of the less fortunate. "The big corporations" are just a convenient get out for not taking responsibility for your own choices. Who do the big corporations answer to? Their customers. Who are their customers? You and I. If you choose to purchase petrol, you're creating demand. If you choose to purchase food grown overseas, you're creating demand for fossil fuels to be burned to transport the food thousands of miles. Are there ~8,000 planes in the sky right now because corporations are evil, or because there's 8,000 planes worth of demand for planes to be in the air? If everyone chose to fly half as much, how many planes would there be in the sky?

You're trying to shift blame to boogeymen, you're trying to argue that "developed countries" and "big corporations" are to blame without acknowledging that you're a part of a developed country, you're a customer of big corporations, you are creating demand. Every time you burn fossil fuels for convenience, you're choosing to pay for your convenience with the suffering of the people in the global south impacted by fossil fuels.

My point is not that you must be perfect, not that you must live a saintly life with no worldly pleasures, my point is that you should do your best, and that if we all do our best, it will have a meaningful impact on the world around us. If what you're doing today is your best, so be it, but from what you've said, it doesn't sound like it at all.


You are getting mixed up between a personal carbon footprint and a corporate carbon footprint, which should be calculated using primary data according to the GHG Protocol standards: https://ghgprotocol.org/


Btw, all the research suggests that recycling does help, with carbon emissions and a variety of other environmental factors.

You might want to check what large corporations have been putting in your brain.

It's almost as if there's a pattern where anything that threatens fossil fuel profits is relentlessly attacked with easily debunkable lies.


Can we stop with the nonsense footprint, token, credit system. Having a single data scientist unfortunately does not a fix make it just stalls the whole thing and leads to bad over engineered, overly technical solutions.

Companies would be better investing in encouraging people to behave better on compus if they were serious, and I mean by actually investing to make using eco friendly things pleasent, not using brown paper to give printouts to clients or having some guy who shouts about the wrong paper going in the wrong bin all the time.

Companies should buy things that people want that produce less waste (yes this then drives cost up and profits down), consolidating physical services (it, printing, office space etc.) and using recycled products by preference (again good recycled paper is not brown toilet paper and can even be given to clients). And when companies start doing this rather than individuals it has a knock on effect on the market and affordability.

And finally, I'm sorry, I fail to understand why anyone needs to pay to be told this.


> Companies should buy things that people want that produce less waste (yes this then drives cost up and profits down), consolidating physical services (it, printing, office space etc.) and using recycled products by preference (again good recycled paper is not brown toilet paper and can even be given to clients).

Yes, and the goal of carbon accounting is basically to give actual data about which of these things offer the better trade off between the goal of reducing emissions and keeping the lights on in your business.

The exercise is only as useful as the actions it enables. Short of absolutes ("just close shop ! The greenest form of transportation is, after all, the hearse") or "one size fits all" solutions, there is some level of accounting that's needed.

The biggest risk, of course, is that the customer hides all information about its emission and just wants you to package a shiny report to fuel the marketing department's greenwashing op.

I'll soon be working for one of bend competitors, it seems, so I'll get to see how it goes...


Sorry to see you downvoted friend.

I've been lamenting for a while the sole metric that is being used for environmental impact is "carbon footprint", just so that bureaucrats and companies can have something to measure while appearing to do something.

PFAS and microplastics might be damaging our genetic material, but their very existence if meaningless to the CO2 metric.

A bad metric is worse than no metric at times.


To be fair, I think a solution like Bend would help companies make the kinds of decisions your advocating for. "You can't improve what you don't measure," so Bend offers a measurement tool that enables procurement managers to make smart buying decisions. Companies pay lots of money for other internal reporting tools; why should sustainability be any different?




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