Steps, Calories… CO2? Emissions-Tracking Apps Are on the Rise
Smartphone apps like Commons and Klarna pitch users on the ability to track the emissions of their purchases and adjust their buying habits accordingly.
The Commons app tracks the carbon footprint of users’ spending and offers cash back for sustainable choices.
Courtesy of Commons
In 2019, Sanchali Pal decided she’d had enough of spreadsheets. For six years, the former consultant had been using Excel to manually track the carbon emissions of her purchases, a routine she says saved her about $2,000 a year by encouraging more secondhand shopping, fewer flights and less meat consumption. But the DIY approach was getting tedious.
So in August of that year, Pal launched Commons, a smartphone app that tracks the carbon footprint of users’ spending, offers cash back for sustainable choices and sells carbon offsets. Today, Commons has tens of thousands of users, whom it says are able to reduce their annual emissions by 19% on average using the app. If everyone in the US achieved that reduction, Pal says it would be the equivalent of taking 80% of cars in the US off the road.