How to Buy a Ton of Carbon

Until recently, the carbon marketplace’s trading floor—where “permits to pollute” are traded, bought and sold—was only open to businesses with emissions to deal with.

Now, though, individuals can get involved through a new website called Sandbag.

The European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme (or ETS) is the world's largest cap-and-trade system. It gives power plants, factories and other polluting firms a fixed number of “permits to pollute.” Businesses that reduce emissions and have permits left over can sell their unused permits to firms that exceed their carbon cap.

But you don’t need to have a big smokestack to buy up a surplus permit. You can just log-on to Sandbag with a credit card, where permits are currently trading at around 25 euros ($34) per ton of carbon (that's about equal to the carbon emitted on one transatlantic flight.) Sandbag destroys the purchased permits, taking them out of circulation and out of the hands of would-be polluters.

The site currently only offers UK permits for purchase. But since we all share the same atmosphere, one less “permit to pollute” in the UK means a cleaner sky for all.

Click here to read an interview with Bryony Worthington, the founder of Sandbag

Click here to read about the Northeast Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the first carbon-trading scheme in the nation

(Smokestack photo by Johan Karlborg)