Understanding our emissions 

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Fossil fuels are a big source of greenhouse gases, but they’re not the only source. Our land use and waste systems are other sources of greenhouse gas emissions. The products and services we purchase rely on emissions-generating processes and materials at every step — from manufacturing to disposal. These greenhouse gases are heating up our planet and causing the global climate crisis.

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Your carbon footprint is an estimation of all the emissions that come from the products and services that you use. When you start learning which of your purchases creates the most emissions, you can prioritize your efforts. 

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Reclaiming our carbon footprints 

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The “carbon footprint” concept draws a lot of speculation because of its troublesome history. It was adapted from a scientific concept and popularized by Big Oil as a way to divert climate responsibility onto individuals. The irony is that Big Oil companies are manufacturing the leading cause of the climate crisis — fossil fuels. 

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It’s time to reclaim our carbon footprints and use them the way they were first intended — as a tool to help us understand our biggest opportunities for impact.  

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Measuring the emissions of everything we buy

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The Commons app is a free, easy tool that automatically estimates the emissions of your purchases to calculate your carbon footprint. Having a carbon footprint is not inherently a bad thing. We all have different factors that affect our carbon footprints, knowing what those factors are can help us make more intentional choices. 

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Commons combines unique information about your lifestyle and your spending history with these third-party datasets to give you a personalized carbon footprint and a real-time feed of your emissions. These insights can help you prioritize your choices so you can make the most impact.

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1. Download the app to start with a 3-minute survey to get a high-level emissions estimate based on where you live and your lifestyle habits. 
2. Securely link your credit and debit cards to refine and automate your carbon footprint based on each of your transactions.

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Download the app to get started → 

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How Commons Calculates Your Carbon Footprint

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Commons’ team of data scientists and carbon analysts use rigorous methodologies from academia, governments, and other trusted sources, along with national and local datasets from 180 purchase categories, to convert spending transactions into a carbon footprint.

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Let’s take a simplified example. At the most basic level, Commons might identify that you bought a chair for $50 at IKEA. It multiplies the dollar value of this transaction by the average carbon intensity (in kg CO₂e per dollar) of a furniture purchase.

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For some types of purchases, this might be relatively straightforward. For others, the calculation is more complicated and requires other inputs. Commons' algorithm is made up of three key data sources: (1) user-inputted information, (2) real-time, automated spending data, and (3) rigorous third-party data sets.

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(1) User-inputted information

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Not all parts of your carbon footprint can be calculated with spending data alone. Some lifestyle factors like dietary preferences and where you live will impact the carbon footprint of your purchases in more personalized ways. Other types of purchases might be too ambiguous to discern from transaction data alone. To create a personalized footprint, Commons asks users to provide answers to questions about diet, lifestyle, and home through our Carbon Survey, which most users complete as part of their app onboarding process. By combining insights from the answers with additional external datasets, such as those from Oxford University and the US EIA, Commons is able to fill in the gaps to create a more complete estimate of your total carbon footprint.

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(2) Automated spending data

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Commons uses the Plaid API, a secure fintech platform, to connect your credit card and debit card accounts and access information about your purchases. Plaid is the same API that Venmo, Robinhood, and most cutting-edge fintech applications use to securely process bank-related information. Commons doesn’t store any sensitive information about accounts, but rather simply reads the names, categories, and amounts of your transactions. We take your data privacy and security very seriously, and never sell your data.

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‍Read our full privacy policy → 

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(3) Third party data sets

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Commons uses a rigorous, national-level dataset from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) called the US Environmentally-Extended Input-Output (US EEIO) model. The EEIO combines macroeconomic data with National Greenhouse Gas Inventories to provide a per-dollar estimate of carbon emissions from 405 US industry sectors. These estimates include carbon impacts starting at the beginning of the supply chain (i.e. raw material extraction) up through to the manufacturer’s gate.

Applying additional research by researchers at Yale University to extend these climate impacts to the customer point-of-purchase, Commons has created a unique, proprietary mapping between financial “transaction categories” and USEEIO environmental “industry sectors”. WIth this mapping, we have carefully crafted carbon weights for each transaction category to provide our community with improved, granular estimates of the carbon impacts of their purchases.

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‍Read more about how Commons calculates carbon footprints → 

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Building a carbon intuition

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Measuring the emissions of everything you buy helps you cultivate an intuition for where carbon emissions are embedded in the supply chains and power sources we rely on. When you understand the carbon emissions of a cross-country flight versus a beef burger, you can start to assign a climate value to your purchases and actions using the earth’s currency — carbon. As you build your carbon intuition, you can better understand where to focus your efforts and how to reduce emissions.