Puro.earth, the leading carbon-crediting platform for carbon dioxide removal (CDR), has issued over 1 million CO2 Removal Certificates (CORCs) since 2019. This represents 1 million tonnes of verified carbon removal. The company has played a key role in expanding the carbon removal market and advancing engineered solutions for climate action.
Reaching the first 500,000 CORCs took nearly five years, but the number doubled in just one year, reaching 1 million in Q1 2025. At this pace, Puro.earth expects to match this milestone again before the end of H1 2026.
How Does Carbon Dioxide Removal Work?
In carbon dioxide removal the CO2 from the atmosphere is pulled and stored securely in geological formations, land, oceans, or durable products. This is a natural process.
But with emissions still rising, CDR needs fast scaling up to make a better impact. There are two main types of CDR methods:
- Natural CDR: Includes afforestation, soil carbon sequestration, and ocean-based methods.
- Technological CDR: Includes Direct Air Capture (DAC), biochar, and enhanced mineralization.
Permanence is key in carbon dioxide removal. High-quality CDR credits must keep CO₂ stored for centuries or even millennia. This prevents it from being released back into the atmosphere. This is where Puro.earth is helping companies achieve their CDR milestones.
- In an EXCLUSIVE Discussion with CarbonCredits, Jan-Willem Bode, President of Puro.earth shared valuable insights on achieving this big milestone, meeting the highest environmental standards, and what’s next.
Read on…
CC: What factors contributed to the rapid growth of Puro.earth’s CO₂ Removal Certificates (CORCs) from 500,000 to over one million in just one year?
President Bode: Our growth is the result of three reinforcing factors:
- Low barrier to entry: Minimal upfront certification costs make it easy for suppliers to join the ecosystem.
- Scalable revenue model: CORC sales provide suppliers with capital to reinvest and expand operations.
- Methodology expansion: New methodologies unlock growth across multiple sectors simultaneously.
Moreover, this reaffirms the strong confidence in the market even while developments are still being made to the regulatory framework for engineering removals in general. These dynamics, combined with buyer demand, geographic diversification, and strong platform credibility, drive exponential momentum in high-integrity carbon removal.
CC: What are the implications of removing one million tonnes of CO₂ in terms of global climate goals, and how do you plan to sustain this momentum?
President Bode: Reaching one million tonnes of CO₂ removed is a significant milestone for Puro.earth and the carbon removal market as a whole. While it represents a small fraction of the reductions needed globally, it signals meaningful progress toward scaling high-integrity carbon removal in line with the Paris Agreement.
More importantly, it demonstrates that durable carbon removal is no longer a concept of the future — it’s happening now and at scale. We plan to sustain and accelerate this momentum by continuing to grow our network of high-quality suppliers, expanding access to global markets for carbon removal, and fostering strong demand from corporate buyers committed to net zero. With increasing interest from climate-forward companies and support from visionary entrepreneurs and investors, we’re on track to issue our next one million CORCs by mid-2026.
Furthermore, we are seeing several important initiatives from our partners within this context. These initiatives focus on creating more liquidity in the market in the short term and more standardization in the medium term.
CC: How does Puro.earth ensure the integrity and quality of the carbon removal credits issued through its platform?
President Bode: Puro.earth ensures the integrity and quality of its carbon removal credits through a science-based, transparent, and independently verified approach. Each CO₂ Removal Certificate (CORC) is issued according to methodologies grounded in robust quantification techniques, designed to meet the highest standards of environmental integrity.
Our methodologies are developed and continuously reviewed by an independent Advisory Board composed of leading scientists, academics, and carbon removal experts – including Advisory Board Chairman Professor Myles Allen, co-author of the Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting, Oxford University. These methodologies set the criteria for what constitutes permanent, net-negative carbon removal.
Puro Registry Tracks Carbon Removal
Based on President’s insights, we explain the process further below:
The Puro Standard: Certifies suppliers that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it for at least 100 years. It then issues CORCs and records them in the transparent Puro Registry.
The Puro Registry: It is transparent and shows active CORCs and the projects behind them. When organizations retire CORCs, they use them to support net-zero or carbon neutrality claims. Each CORC represents one metric ton of long-term CO2 removal.
They use CORC100+ and CORC1000+ labels to indicate estimated storage durability in years. However, these labels only provide general guidance rather than exact retention periods. Before December 2022, all CORCs carried a single label, regardless of storage duration.
Furthermore, independent auditors verify each project every year to ensure compliance with Puro Standard’s science-based methods.
Scaling Carbon Removal with Proven Methods
Puro.earth pioneered carbon removal certification for biochar, carbonated materials, biomass storage, enhanced rock weathering, and geologically stored carbon. These methods capture CO2 using Direct Air Capture (DAC) and Bioenergy with Carbon Capture & Storage (BECCS).
Unlike traditional carbon offsets, which focus on reducing emissions, CORCs represent direct carbon removal. The Puro Registry updates its data daily. However, it only releases data from before January 2022 if both parties agree. Beneficiaries can request a delay in publication, but only for up to 12 months.
The company’s 1 million CORCs (52.13% already retired) account for 576,561 metric tons of CO2 removed. Two key methodologies drive this milestone:
- Geologically Stored Carbon (34.3%) – DACCS and BECCS offer reliable, long-term storage.
- Biochar (34.1%) – A scalable solution that locks carbon into stable materials.
The United States leads in carbon removal projects, contributing 45% of total issuances. Finland (9.87%), Bolivia (9.64%), and Brazil (9.15%) follow, along with Austria, Norway, and the UK.
Rising demand for high-impact carbon removal continues to drive growth in the CORC market, with buyers seeking scalable solutions for long-term sustainability.
Tech Giants Drive Carbon Removal Growth
CDR credits let companies and governments balance their emissions. They do this by funding projects that actively remove CO₂. CDR credits are different from traditional carbon offsets.
Microsoft, Google, and Frontier Buyers have led the early-stage carbon removal (CDR) market, according to CDR.fyi leaderboards. Their investments have reduced risks for new CDR technologies and helped suppliers scale up their operations.
- Microsoft accounted for 63% of total CDR purchase volume in 2024 to achieve carbon negativity by 2030. The tech giant secured around 5.1 million metric tons of durable CDR credits.
- Google purchased about 501 thousand tons of CDR credits, making it second to Microsoft.
- Frontier buyers—including Stripe, Shopify, and Watershed—continued to support promising carbon removal projects, collectively purchasing 667.4K tonnes of CDR credits.
Top Buyers of Puro.earth’s CORCs to Offset Emissions
The press release highlighted that Microsoft, Shopify, and Zurich Insurance purchase CORCs to reduce their carbon footprints and combat climate change.
In 2021, Nasdaq acquired a majority stake in Puro.earth. Together, they are advancing the carbon removal industry by creating new revenue streams that accelerate CDR adoption.
Experts predict that high-emission industries like aviation, concrete, steel, shipping, and chemicals will drive the next wave of demand. Some companies in these sectors have already acted.
Notably, SkiesFifty and Gigablue, a Puro.earth supplier, signed a four-year deal to buy 200,000 tonnes of carbon removal credits.
Puro.earth’s issuance of over 1 million CORCs shows strong growth and effectiveness in engineered carbon removal technologies. This milestone highlights the rising demand for reliable carbon credits. It also shows the platform’s promise to be open and responsible in the carbon market.
The post Puro.earth Hits 1M Tonnes of Verified Carbon Removal – Exclusive Interview with President Jan-Willem Bode appeared first on Carbon Credits.
The accounting differences that decide whether your nature investment shows up in inventory, in BVCM, or nowhere at all.
The question reaches a procurement team about three weeks before the next sustainability committee meeting. Someone has read about insetting. Someone else has just signed off on an offset purchase. The CSO wants to know if the two are interchangeable. The answer is no, and the GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard is the reason why.
This article walks through what each term means at audit-grade specificity, what the standards actually say about how each gets counted, and how to decide which tool fits which target. The insetting vs offsetting question is one of the most-searched in corporate climate strategy, and one of the most poorly answered. By the end of this piece, you should be able to brief a committee on the difference without notes.
The two definitions, in plain English
Offsetting means buying carbon credits generated outside your value chain and retiring them against your residual emissions. The reduction happens somewhere else, financed by you, and the credit is the receipt.
Insetting means investing in emission reductions or removals inside your own value chain, typically with suppliers, where the reduction is directly linked to the products and services you buy. The reduction happens inside the boundary of your Scope 3 inventory, and the accounting treatment is fundamentally different.
The shorthand from the University of Oxford’s Nature-based Insetting Initiative is useful: insetting is what you do with the supply chain you have; offsetting is what you do with the supply chain you do not have.
What the GHG Protocol Land Sector Standard actually says
The GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard, finalised in 2024 after a multi-year pilot, sets the rules for how land-based emission reductions and removals enter corporate inventories. The Standard distinguishes between inventory accounting (Scope 1, 2, and 3) and project or intervention accounting (a separate methodology for crediting).
For insetting, the practical implication is that supplier-level interventions, when properly measured and attributed, can reduce your Scope 3 category 1 (purchased goods and services) emissions in your inventory. The reduction is not a credit retired against the inventory; it is a lower inventory number, period.
For offsetting, the credit is retired separately. It can be reported as a contribution toward a net-zero claim under the SBTi Beyond Value Chain Mitigation framework or as part of a VCMI Carbon Integrity claim, but it does not lower the inventory number.
A practical consequence: if your Science Based Target requires a 50% absolute reduction in Scope 3 emissions by 2030, insetting moves you toward the target. Offsetting does not. This single point of difference reshapes the procurement decision.
When insetting counts toward Scope 3 (and when it does not)
Insetting counts toward Scope 3 only when several conditions are met:
- The intervention must occur with an entity in your value chain.
- The emissions reduction or removal must be measured against a defensible baseline.
- The reduction must be attributed to your share of that supplier’s output, not double-counted with other buyers.
- It must follow the inventory accounting rules in the GHG Protocol Land Sector Standard, not the project accounting rules used to generate credits.
The most common failure mode is double counting. If your supplier sells the same reduction as a credit on the voluntary market and also reports it to you as a Scope 3 reduction, the math breaks. The Standard requires you to address this risk, typically by purchasing and retiring the supplier-issued credit as part of your inventory or by contractual provisions that prevent the supplier from selling the reduction twice.
When insetting does not count toward Scope 3: when the intervention sits with a supplier you do not buy from, when the baseline is not defensible, when the attribution is unclear, or when the documentation does not survive audit. Those cases default to Beyond Value Chain Mitigation, which is still useful but operates on a different ledger.
The procurement and supplier engagement question
Insetting is harder than offsetting. That is the unfashionable truth most buyers eventually confront. Offsetting is a transaction; insetting is a relationship.
To run an insetting program, you need supplier mapping precise enough to know which farms or facilities sit at which Scope 3 boundary. You need an engagement model that gets suppliers to participate, which usually requires multi-year commitments and shared economics. You need an MRV architecture that measures the right things and produces audit-ready documentation. And you need a contractual structure that prevents double counting and protects both sides.
The trade-off you receive in return is significant. Reductions count against your inventory rather than your residual. Supplier relationships deepen, which protects sourcing continuity. Yield and quality improvements often follow regenerative interventions, which reduces your input cost over time. And the regulatory file, under CSRD, CSDDD, EUDR, and the SBTi FLAG Guidance, is materially stronger.
Choosing the right tool for the right target
A practical decision rule. If your target is a science-based Scope 3 reduction and you operate in a FLAG sector or source FLAG commodities, insetting is the structurally correct tool. If your target is a net-zero claim that includes neutralising hard-to-abate residual emissions outside your value chain, BVCM via high-integrity offsets is the structurally correct tool. Most companies with material Scope 3 exposure need both, in different proportions, sequenced over time.
The sequencing matters. Insetting takes longer to stand up but produces a permanent reduction in the inventory. Offsetting can be transacted faster but does not change the inventory and now sits under tighter claim restrictions. Treat them as complementary tools with different jobs, not as substitutes. The Accountability Framework Initiative and the IUCN Global Standard for Nature-based Solutions both provide useful guardrails for the insetting side, with biodiversity, human rights, and benefit-sharing requirements that go beyond carbon math.
If you are mapping a Scope 3 reduction roadmap and need to scope which interventions count toward your inventory versus which sit in Beyond Value Chain Mitigation, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you structure a nature-based supply chain investment program that fits your FLAG exposure, your target architecture, and your audit horizon. Schedule a consultation.
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