We recently announced the Green Marketplace, a network of 80+ climate-friendly brands and 65k+ EV chargers where Aspiration customers can earn up to 6% cash back.³
If you’re curious to learn more about the selection process for the brands in the network, read on.
How We Determine If Products and Services Are Climate-Friendly
Finding companies with a truly "positive" impact on the climate is a challenge.
Most businesses, even the most climate-conscious ones, rely on suppliers or partners who generate carbon emissions.
So, instead of focusing only on "positive" impact, we look for companies actively working towards a net-zero or climate-positive future. These are the businesses making significant strides to reduce their own emissions and supporting broader efforts to decarbonize our economy.
Based on this approach, we have four pillars that climate-friendly companies can fit into:
Neutralized Climate Impact: These companies actively measure their carbon footprint, take action to reduce it, and offset remaining emissions using high quality carbon credits. While not perfect, this practice forces companies to measure their climate impact, fund projects like reforestation or wind energy installations, and reduce their emissions over time.
Lower Climate Impact: These companies have among the lowest climate impact within their industry. They may reduce their climate impact by improving the energy efficiency of their facilities, use renewable electricity to power their buildings, or use lower-carbon materials to create their products, such as recycled plastic or organic cotton.
Climate Change Solution: These companies go beyond simply reducing harm – they create products and services that directly help fight climate change. They include solutions across energy, transportation, food and agriculture, fashion, and lifestyle. Without solutions like these, the world may not be able to achieve our global carbon emission reduction goals.
Committed to Lowering Impact: These companies are transparent about their environmental impact and are committed to reducing it. This includes publicly disclosing their emissions, setting science-aligned reduction targets, achieving certifications like the B Corp Certification, or joining environmental memberships such as 1% for the Planet.
To qualify a company for each of these pillars, we partner with leading, independent organizations to provide data on the climate progress of each company in our Green Marketplace.
Where data is unavailable, we complete an internal assessment based on the information provided by the brand’s website or to us directly.
As corporate climate progress and reporting evolves, we will continue to update our assessment framework to best match our customers with climate-friendly merchants.