Credit Card Statements to Include Your Carbon Emissions Soon (if you have a MasterCard corporate card)
May 24th, 2011 by Zachary Shahan
With approximately 80% of companies expressing interest in green travel initiatives and many of those companies implementing programs to help tackle global warming by cutting their own carbon emissions, sustainability leader Brighter Planet and MasterCard have teamed up to provide a first-of-its-kind service for these businesses.
A new MasterCard Carbon Emissions Reporting feature for corporate cards automatically provides “reporting and analysis of estimated travel-related carbon emissions data” based on your transactions.
Approximately $240 billion is spent each year for U.S. business travel. That represents a huge chunk of corporations’ greenhouse gas emissions. Paying more attention to this information and how it impacts global warming should help more companies to act more sustainably and cut or offset their travel emissions.
“The Carbon Emissions Reporting program provides access to new data that is increasingly valued by companies as they strive to benchmark sustainability goals and initiatives, confront sustainability standards on their supply chains, and address the environmental concerns of stakeholders,” MasterCard writes.
Detailed estimated data on flights, rental cars, hotels and other travel purchases will be automatically processed by Brighter Planet’s CM1 calculation platform, which will integrate carbon scores into MasterCard smartdata.gen2(TM), MasterCard’s industry-leading, web-based expense management and reporting solution. The carbon scoring, which uses independently validated, standards-compliant calculation methodologies, will let companies benchmark, track, compare, and report various emissions metrics across organizational divisions.
Cool.
The program is supposed to launch later this year.
Related Stories:
- Eco-Adventurer Travels U.S. Using 101 Unique Modes of Transport
- Green Your Transport! (Going Green Tip #4)
- Analyze the Carbon Emissions of Websites
- Global CO2 Emissions Continue to Rise
- Global Warming Effects and Causes: A Top 10 List
Photo via Robert Scoble
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About the Author
Zachary Shahan is the director of CleanTechnica, the most popular cleantech-focused website in the world, and Planetsave, a world-leading green and science news site. He has been covering green news of various sorts since 2008, and he has been especially focused on solar energy, electric vehicles, and wind energy since 2009. Aside from his work on CleanTechnica and Planetsave, he's the founder and director of Solar Love, EV Obsession, and Bikocity. To connect with Zach on some of your favorite social networks, go to ZacharyShahan.com and click on the relevant buttons.
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