Two of Ware2Go’s analysts describe the process for calculating carbon emissions of merchants’ shipments to deliver on a promise to offset emissions for all shipments within the Ware2Go network.
How Ware2Go is Measuring Carbon Emissions for Merchants
Chris Weathers:
My name is Chris Weathers. I work in business intelligence, and in this project I validated some of the calculations that Pachama gave us and also provided some background research on carbon offset.
Nick Hyder:
Nick Hyder. I’m a data scientist with Ware2Go. I contributed to the project by forming some of the calculations that are going into our carbon formulas.
Nick Hyder:
The main calculations that go into the carbon formulas is your average weight, average distance and then total number of shipments.
Chris Weathers:
And we also take a pretty conservative approach there. So, we had a distance traveled multiplier, which is a 1.5 multiplier. There’s a bunch of different ways that a package can get to a specific destination. So in order to kind of calculate all that, besides just using a straight line distance, we added that 0.5 multiplier in order to potentially compensate for kind of any inter-distance that the package went through.
Nick Hyder:
So we first approached this by hitting the Google Maps API. So we looked at all of our ship-from/ship-to locations and calculated what the optimal driving distance would be for each of those. So that’s something that’s easy to do for one package, much more difficult to do for hundreds or thousands of packages.
Nick Hyder:
But we recognize that using the optimal driving distance wasn’t the best option because that’s not necessarily how the package is going to travel. So in our research, we saw that others approach this by calculating the straight line distance between the origins of code and the destinations of code, and then applying a 1.5 times multiplier, it’s taking a little more of a conservative approach, but it’s something that’s well-researched and allows us to accurately estimate the total distance of the package travel.
Chris Weathers:
Yeah. I mean, I think we actually kind of did that calculation on our own, and were kind of getting to a 1.2 multiplier. And so just kind of using that 1.5 is just much more conservative, and, if anything, we’re offsetting more carbon than less. So, we’re still kind of sticking true to offsetting a hundred percent of the carbon that our merchants are shipping.
Chris Weathers:
On a quarterly basis, we’re going to revise our numbers. We’re going to kind of look at the average distance traveled for each shipment and also kind of look at the total amount of packages we’ve sent out.
Nick Hyder:
Over time, as Ware2Go grows and so our number of shipments, we need to take that into account. We also have a peak season at the end of the year that’s expected to have more shipments. So we believe that calculating it quarterly after we’ve received all that information is a better way to approach it, as opposed to doing our own internal forecasting, just for the purposes of accuracy.
Chris Weathers:
You know, I think it’s also really interesting that Ware2Go is actually assuming the cost as opposed to putting it on to the customer. And so that just kind of shows Ware2Go’s commitment to this carbon offset project and their commitment to the environment in a pretty carbon-intensive industry.