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Wanted: my grandfather’s piano. Carbon balanced shippers only, please.
To help kick start the program, uShip itself is paying for the first month of carbon offsets for any shipping company that participates. uShip is a really cool concept. If you’ve ever tried to ship hard-to-move goods like a boat, piano, or furniture, you know what a pain it can be to wrest bids from shipping companies, especially if you’re not shipping enough to fill a truck. With uShip, you post a request, and service providers bid for your business. You can review feedback on the service providers and pick the one you want. uShip is already a good environmental story, because many of these shippers are using extra cargo space to haul your stuff, so the shipments are more efficient. This also saves you money. TerraPass helps make it an even better story by letting service providers balance out the impact of the shipments they book on uShip. TerraPass used the uShip service back in December and were very happy with the bids and service we received. We also like the uShip team (check out this funny YouTube video of them). Like many of our partnerships, this started with someone finding out about TerraPass and wondering (in a blog entry, no less) how they could incorporate carbon offsets into their business. For others wondering the same thing, don’t be shy — give us a call. We’re also excited about this partnership because it shows yet another way businesses can differentiate themselves by engaging their customers on environmental issues. It may seem strange, but lots of active eBay sellers will tell you the amazing power of bolding a listing (at $0.25 per transaction). The uShip option is kind of like bolding, but with the proceeds going to a specific environmental service relevant to the bid. 
Look for this logo to help fight global warming when you ship with uShip. The program just went up on Saturday, so we’re anxiously awaiting feedback from the first signups. In the meantime, if you have shipping to do, head over to uShip and look for TerraPass Certified Providers. Comments4 comment(s) on this post. Leave your own!
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The down side to the TerraPass is that uhsip has no way to control their carriers or verify that they are approved. If you look at the forums on uship there is more problems than good. I suggest looking into alternate avenues. Uship is a trend that is starting to fade, they have less and less listings and carriers taking money from customers.
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Hmm, not my experience at all. We listed a shipment in about 5 minutes, and received about 10 bids, half of which were already travelling SF-LA the week we needed shipments.
The same work would have taken hours by contacting shippers directly.
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Not my experience either - I think this is a great idea and I'm happy to see smaller companies like uShip behave responsibly. I've used them twice now and had wonderful carriers who also saved me a good amount of money.
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This is a cool new product, thanks for developing it.
I was wondering if you could share the underlying assumptions you used to determine the price?
I did a back of the envelope calculation, and if you are offsetting carbon at $8 a ton, and if 20 pounds of CO2 are emitted per gallon this would mean you are assuming the trucking uses 0.004 gallons of fuel per ton mile. Is this correct?
This seems low compared to this report that estimates semi-trailers get 117,000 lb mile/gallon or .0086 gallons per ton mile.
I was thinking that it would be great if there was an option to offset the carbon emissions when you shipped a package via UPS or USPS. But then I ran the numbers and it turned out to be less than a penny to ship a 2 lb package 1,000 miles, so it isn't even worth doing. In fact, I estimate that UPS could offset all their carbon emissions for just an additional .2% of their expenses (but this is still $80 million annually).
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