Buyers urged to count the hidden cost of Black Friday bargains

In an inflation-defying frenzy, 27-million South Africans are expected to swipe their bank cards this weekend as they get wrapped up in the Black Friday bargain bonanza.

SA’s revenue from Black Friday is about R4.7bn in a single day. But while shoppers are loading their online carts in a feverish rush to get the best deals on anything from top-end smartphones and TVs to toilet paper, this year some thought should go into the effects on the climate.

Steffen Burrows, one of the three founders of local carbon offsetting business Curbon, explains the large volume of goods sold on Black Friday causes a retail emissions spike. These emissions account for a product’s entire production chain, including raw materials and manufacturing, as well as warehousing and logistical emissions.

“Increased consumption results in increased emissions, which is why we want to use Black Friday to create awareness about the climate impact of online shopping, and at the same time create a pay-it-forward culture in SA from a climate perspective.”

To achieve this, Curbon has built a plug-in that can be incorporated into the payment process of any online shopping platform to offer customers the option of offsetting the emissions linked to their purchases at checkout.

Curbon uses international input/output databases to assign emissions to a product. The information to do this provides roughly a 90% certainty in terms of the emissions that can be ascribed to a product, but Curbon over-offsets by about 15% to make sure that all emissions have been catered for.

On the upper end, the products that are responsible for most emissions are electronics such as laptops and smartphones, which contain many parts made from mined minerals. At the lower end are products such as clothing and certain groceries.

There is no standard pricing in the global carbon market, and the price of credits is increasing as demand grows. Burrows says a single credit now trades for between R300 and R900, depending in the co-benefits associated with the credit.

One carbon credit represents 1 tonne of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere.

There is a “huge” gap in the market for carbon credits in SA, says Burrows. “We would really like to see more carbon credit projects get off the ground in SA. At the moment it is a pretty constrained market because when credits from new projects become available big corporates tend to buy the bulk of them to offset their own emissions.”

Curbon purchases carbon credits from local carbon registries, Credible Carbon and the Climate Neutral Group, as well as the international group Gold Standard.

“We try to strike a balance between local impactful projects and robust international credits.”

Some of the local projects Curbon supports offer audited carbon offsets, as well as a positive socioeconomic impact. One is a low-carbon housing project in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. It also supports the cleaner cooking alternative project Wonderbag (a non-electric slow-cooker), and a Stellenbosch recycling project that provides work for 600 waste entrepreneurs. The project pays out R130,000 daily to waste pickers and diverts huge amounts of waste from landfills, thereby curbing emissions from waste.

Burrows says there is no data available yet to reliably project demand from SA consumers for carbon offsetting of their online purchases. When Curbon officially launches its plug-in in January the response will determine local consumer appetite for responsible shopping.

“We really hope this will be something that SA shoppers will want. On average, the cost of offsetting purchases will amount to about 2% to 3% of the value of the shopping cart total, so it is a small fee to really make a positive impact with your online purchasing.”

erasmusd@businesslive.co.za