Choose your own project type

Tom Arnold | June 2, 2008

TerraPass now lets you mix your own portfolio of carbon offsets.

Over the weekend, we rolled out the first version of a feature that lets you create a custom portfolio of offsets from project types of your choosing. Now when you purchase an offset from TerraPass, you can help direct our efforts to project types you like the most.

When you calculate your footprint and add an offset product to your shopping cart, just click the “change my portfolio” link and mix and match in 1,000 pound increments until you get the blend of clean energy, farm power and landfill gas capture that you want. You can also see a list of a our most current projects on our project feedback page.

(In a sign of our times, a blogger beat to us our own announcement, with Matt from Carbon Neutral Digest carrying the news on Friday. Hat tip to Matt.)

Let us know what you think in the comments, especially if you’ve used the feature when getting your Dad a TerraPass for Father’s Day.

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Comments

1. By Clara on June 4, 2008 6:20 PM

Hurray! This is awesome :) Can you tell us a little bit more about some reasons why someone may choose some offsets over others? Just to start the conversation, I am not a big fan of traditional windpower because those big bad turbines can kill innocent birds, although it is unintentional!

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2. By Tom Arnold on June 4, 2008 7:26 PM

Hi Clara:

We like all of them, which is why in our general portfolio, we blend all three of them.

But the point here is choice, and for many folks the avian issue with wind will be a factor. Contrary to your suggestion, bigger windmills here are actually better -- the slower moving and larger blades are more easily spotted by birds. Also, wind farms have improved their environmental studies to a great degree -- check out the details on Foote Creek for an example. Finally, to put this in perspective, if you've got cats, you may want to know that house cats kill orders of magnitude more birds than wind mills. In fact one of our cats delivered two this very week. Ugh.

But all of that is kind of not the point of project choice. Mix yourself a bit of landfill energy and farm power and you're done.

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3. By Chistopher Keys on June 14, 2008 4:53 AM

Hi Tom,

We just covered this story on our blog but one thing I was curious about is will Terrapass allow for selection of a specific project rather than a pool of project types?

@ Clara - I've seen some designs for windmills that instead of having blades radiating outwards from the center have blades radiating inwards, sort of like the engines on an airplane, and use a protective grill to ensure no birds get killed. I think we should see this type of design coming in the near future, especially as I understand they produce more energy than the other kind.

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