Living a more sustainable life is a goal we should all shoot for. As climate and environmental issues continue to worsen, we can all be part of the solution. There are many easy ways to get started, and now is a great time to start living sustainably. We’ll cover ways to reduce waste, grow your own food, and live a carbon-neutral life. Stick around to the end to learn how you can put your carbon offsetting on autopilot.
1. Reduce The Waste You Produce
Rethinking how we consume is an excellent way to reduce the waste we generate every day. It will help eliminate single-use plastics and reduce harmful chemicals that pollute the environment.
To have the biggest impact, consider products that you use daily. Some good examples are cleaning supplies, food storage containers, and clothing. Here are a few ways you can reduce your everyday waste.
A Greener Way To Clean
Cleaning supplies like dish & laundry soap create a ton of waste. First off, they come in bulky plastic containers that end up in the trash. This is especially true for bottles with a spray nozzle. When the soap is gone the bottle and spray nozzle are tossed, even though they are still useful. Bottles like this are a huge waste of plastic.
On top of the plastic waste, they create unnecessary carbon emissions. A high percentage of these products is water, so you’re paying to ship what you could get out of the tap. It’s time to switch to a greener way to clean. Start reusing the bottle, and reduce shipping weight by checking out companies like Dropps. They sell cleaning products with less waste, pollution, and toxic chemicals. Instead of buying full bottles of soap (and mostly water), you’ll get soap concentrate shipped to you that can be used to refill the bottle. Just add your own tap water and bam. You’ve just reduced your plastic waste & carbon footprint. They’ve also got sustainably sourced laundry pods, dishwasher detergent, hand soaps, and more.
There are also small ways you can reduce your cleaning waste right now. An easy one is to utilize rags & towels rather than reaching for a paper towel anytime there is a spill. Since cloth products can be washed and reused, waste is reduced. Pair that with the sustainable soaps above, and you’ll be a green cleaning machine in no time!
Sustainable Food Storage That Lasts
Food storage containers are also a huge polluter. Throwing leftovers in a single-use ziplock or plastic wrap before refrigerating food is a wasteful activity that we can stop. Reduce your waste by purchasing reusable food containers. I prefer glass containers that are microwave safe and don’t give food that weird taste that plastic does. They also last longer and don’t leach harmful chemicals into your food.
The good news is that you don’t have to go buying new 50 new food storage containers. Upcycling is a great way to reuse glass containers you’ve already purchased. Anytime you finish off a jar of pickles or spaghetti sauce, throw it in the dishwasher rather than the trash. These are great for holding leftovers, smoothies, or homemade sauces. The idea of upcycling doesn’t only apply to glass jars though. Anytime you are about to throw something away, stop and think if it has another use. You’ll be amazed at how much money you can save by upcycling, rather than buying new.
2. Grow Your Own Grub
Food prices have been going nuts over the past few years. Environmental and political factors impact not only supply but the quality of food as well. Unfortunately, most people are stuck paying these higher prices or go without fresh produce.
Luckily there are ways to grow your own produce, no matter where you live. With multiple ways to grow fresh fruits & vegetables, everyone has the opportunity to be their own food source. If you have the space, you can combine composting and gardening for a bountiful, yet affordable garden. Living it up in an apartment downtown? We’ve even got a solution for you, hydroponic gardening.
Let’s start with traditional soil gardening paired with composting. What is composting? It’s only one of the best ways to reduce your carbon footprint & help the environment. It turns food scraps, grass clippings, paper, and more into nutrient-rich soil that can be used for gardening. Composting also prevents waste from ending up in a landfill and emitting methane, a strong contributor to global warming. Gardening using composted soil is a zero-waste solution that is easy, and you can feel good about. Want to learn more about composting, check out this article from pela.
Gardening in any type of soil is great. It provides your family with healthy, sustainable produce, and takes some strain off the food supply. You can garden in either a tilled plot of land or raised bed. Gardening does require diligence, however. You’ll need to actively upkeep the plants for the best reason results. In most places, outdoor gardening is a seasonal activity and can’t be done in the winter.
Low on space (or time), but still want to grow your own food? Thanks to recent advances in hydroponics, growing produce indoors is incredibly easy. Hydroponics means growing plants without soil. By using LED lights to fuel photosynthesis, you’ll be able to sustainably garden produce year-round. Not only that, but your food will be up to 75% more nutritious than buying from a grocery store. Get the full scoop on hydroponics here.
How To Grow Hydroponic Plants
Indoor hydroponic setups can be homemade or purchased online. You can get started for under $100, or go big and grow 30 plants at a time with a smart system like Gardyn . These hydroponic setups are pricey, but can automatically water & adjust the light to optimize plant growth. You’ll be enjoying healthy, sustainable produce without having to step foot in a grocery store.
Hydroponics is the future of produce production. Compared to traditional gardening methods, hydrophnics use 90% less water, produce more in less space, and grow up to twice as fast. In the future, you may even seen entire farms of vertical hydroponics. Once the technology is perfected, it will make the food supply way more efficient than it currently is.
Both indoor and outdoor gardening are healthy, sustainable ways to grow your own food. And don’t forget, you are also helping those who can’t garden their own food. The more produce demand we can eliminate with gardening, the lower the price of food for everyone else. Growing your own healthy food source is good for your body, your neighbors, and the planet.
3. Strive Toward A Carbon Neutral Life
At the end of the day, reducing your carbon footprint is one of the most powerful ways to help combat climate change. Almost everything that we create adds CO2 to the atmosphere. This sounds scary, but where there are great carbon emissions, there are great opportunities to offset them. There are hundreds of ways you can immediately reduce your carbon footprint. Here are a few to get you started.
Go Thrifting! Try Buying Used Goods
Consumerism dominates the American mind. With so many goods available to us, it’s hard to ignore the temptation to buy everything new. However, buying used goods is an excellent way to reduce carbon emissions. Since another new item doesn’t need to be manufactured, no additional carbon is produced. Check out Craigslist and your local thrift stores before buying new. Who knows, you might end up finding something pretty awesome!
Put You Carbon Offset On Auto Pilot
Every day we can take steps to reduce our carbon footprint. However, it can be difficult (if not impossible) to become carbon neutral. Luckily, we’ve got an easy way to put your carbon reduction on auto pilot.
At The Carbon Offset Company, we believe in empowering everyone to combat climate change. For just $5 per month, we will plant 5 trees to offset the carbon you generate. That’s less than the cost of a Big Mac meal!
On top of living carbon neutral, you’ll also get a custom monthly certificate and make a difference around the world. We plant in the US and across the globe to make a difference. Planting trees does more than just reduce atmospheric carbon, it also improves the lives and environments in the areas that we plant.
You can feel good about doing good for the planet, all on auto-pilot! Check out the plans today, and start living your life carbon neutral.
Want to keep up with what we’re doing? Follow us on Instagram!
The post How To Live Sustainably – 3 Ways You Can Help The Environment Right Now appeared first on The Global Improvement Group | Align with the Planet..
EU Directive: Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT)
The EU Directive, Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT), takes effect on September 27, 2026.(1) The goal of ECGT is to protect consumers by ensuring that environmental claims are fair, understandable, and reliable. This regulation does create a new compliance requirement for businesses, but it also provides sustainability and marketing teams with important guidance that helps create consistency in sustainability communications.
Key takeaways
- ECGT takes effect September 27, 2026, and prohibits claims that a product or service has a neutral, reduced, or positive environmental impact based on offsetting alone.
- Named example phrases the regulation prohibits include climate neutral, CO2 neutral certified, carbon positive, climate net zero, climate compensated, reduced climate impact, and limited CO2 footprint.
- ECGT does not want to deter investment in carbon credits. It wants companies to communicate the real benefits of the projects they support instead.
- SBTi’s guidance recommends framing carbon credits as taking responsibility for ongoing emissions, not as making a product or company neutral.
- Voluntary carbon projects deliver real climate progress: reducing super-pollutants, protecting and restoring ecosystems, and supporting communities.
Regarding carbon credits specifically, voluntary carbon projects deliver important climate progress and environmental benefits that provide many talking points for companies. They reduce climate super-pollutants by removing industrial emissions like methane, N2O, HFCs and others. They protect and restore valuable ecosystems and carbon sinks like forests, mangroves and grasslands. They help communities by reducing local pollution, creating employment opportunities, improving access to healthcare, and more.
The Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), a global leader in business climate action, concludes that alongside aggressive decarbonization, we should also use high quality carbon credits to take responsibility for our ongoing emissions. SBTi recognizes that carbon credits are important “to help limit temperature overshoot, mitigate transition risks, and support climate solutions.”(2)
ECGT language on carbon offsetting says that they do not want to deter investment in carbon credits. They just want companies to focus on communicating the benefits of the projects they support and avoid claims beyond the scope of carbon credits, which is good for everyone, companies and consumers alike.
The regulation reinforces that carbon credits do not change the sustainability of your products, so carbon credit buyers should not suggest that their products are more sustainable because of carbon credits. Instead, companies need to promote their climate contributions as a way to compensate or take responsibility for their carbon emissions by supporting projects that do great things like reducing global carbon emissions, reducing pollution, preventing deforestation, restoring forests, and more.
ECGT language related to carbon offsetting
The regulation is particularly focused on prohibiting claims, based on offsetting greenhouse gas emissions, that a product or service has a neutral, reduced, or positive impact on the environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. These claims are prohibited in all circumstances because they mislead consumers into believing the claim relates to the product itself, or to how it was made and supplied, or into thinking that using the product carries no environmental impact at all.
Named examples of prohibited claims include:
- climate neutral
- CO2 neutral certified
- carbon positive
- climate net zero
- climate compensated
- reduced climate impact
- limited CO2 footprint
These claims are only allowed when they rest on a product’s actual lifecycle impact, not on offsetting emissions outside that product’s value chain, since the two are not equivalent. This prohibition does not stop companies from advertising their investments in environmental initiatives, including carbon credit projects, as long as they present that information in a way that is not misleading and that meets the other requirements of Union law.(1)
SBTi also provides guidance on climate contribution language in its Corporate Net Zero Standard Version 2.0 Draft for Second Public Consultation, November 2025. While the SBTi language is fairly technical, it has a good framework for crafting a climate contribution message.
SBTi Language for Carbon Credits(3)
- Take responsibility for ongoing emissions by delivering mitigation impact contributions
- Carbon credits certify the mitigation outcomes of projects that reduce, avoid, or remove carbon emissions
- Activities that reduce emissions from emission sources not located within the company’s value chain
- Activities that conserve, protect, and enhance natural carbon sinks
- Activities that capture and store carbon in storage pools
SBTi’s draft standard also walks through sample claim language for this kind of contribution. In general, the samples move from a simple percentage statement, to naming a specific verified tonnage tied to that percentage, to a fuller statement that breaks the tonnage into reductions versus removals. Across all three, the framing stays consistent: a company took responsibility for a defined share of its ongoing emissions over a set period, by funding a specific, verified amount of mitigation, achieved through emission reductions or removals.(3)
FAQ: ECGT and Carbon Credit Claims
When does the ECGT directive take effect?
The rules apply across the EU from September 27, 2026, after member states transposed the directive into national law by March 27, 2026.
Does ECGT ban carbon offsetting?
No. It bans specific marketing claims that a product or service is environmentally neutral, reduced impact, or positive based on offsetting. Advertising investment in carbon credit projects themselves is still allowed if it is not misleading.
What phrases does ECGT specifically prohibit?
Named examples include climate neutral, CO2 neutral certified, carbon positive, climate net zero, climate compensated, reduced climate impact, and limited CO2 footprint, when those claims are based on offsetting rather than a product’s actual lifecycle impact.
How should a company describe its carbon credit purchases instead?
SBTi’s guidance recommends stating the specific verified tonnage of emissions reductions or removals funded and describing that as taking responsibility for a defined share of ongoing emissions, rather than claiming the company or product is neutral.
Does this rule apply to company level sustainability claims too?
ECGT is focused on claims about specific products and services in consumer marketing. Broader company level sustainability communication is a separate matter still governed by other existing rules.
While ECGT does add a new compliance burden for businesses, it helps create consistency in sustainability messaging that is important to building confidence in voluntary carbon projects and scaling the industry to help us achieve progress on global carbon emissions.
Disclaimer: Terrapass does not provide legal or regulatory advice. Any interpretation of regulation must be approved by your legal representative.
References:
(1) https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2024/825/oj
(2) https://files.sciencebasedtargets.org/production/files/Corporate-Net-Zero-Standard-version-2.pdf
(3) https://files.sciencebasedtargets.org/production/files/CNZS-V2-Second-Consultation-Draft.pdf
The post The EU’s New Green Claims Rules and Carbon Credits appeared first on Terrapass.
Most businesses that decide to act on their net-zero targets reach the same point of friction. Buying carbon credits has meant tracking down brokers, sitting through sales calls, and requesting a quote just to learn a price, sometimes with limited proof of what you are buying.
The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.
Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.
Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.
You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.
Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings
The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.
Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.
Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.
What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.
The three commodity exposures that hit margin first
For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.
- Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
- Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
- Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.
TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes
The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.
For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.
The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.
What procurement and finance can do now
Three actions matter near-term.
Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.
Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.
Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.
Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.
If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.
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