EcoPoints | Carbon Credits

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EcoPoints are for teams

Thousands of teams look to monday.com to provide all of the possible tools to make their team exceed expectations. As the world looks to combat climate change, more teams look to solutions to offset their impact on the climate.

EcoPoints on monday.com presents itself as an option for teams to easily tap into the carbon credit market so that they can reach their carbon-negative goals.

Pledge carbon removal

Here's how it works:

A team decides to remove X tons of carbon from the air.
Every task has "EcoPoints" allotted to it (can be any KPI, as long as it is a number).
At the end of a time period, the team fulfills its carbon pledge.
The team member with the most EcoPoints is declared the champion, and is immortalized in the monday.com board's hall of fame!

How it works image

EcoPoints can be anything and are calculated per board. Sales, time spent, or just an arbitrary number. As long as it's a number column in your tasks, you can set it in your settings. Teams pledge to remove carbon in exchange for productivity, and team members that have the most EcoPoints accrued will gain the most credit!

Building blocks

The initial conception of EcoPoints intended to use charities like OneTreePlanted instead of the carbon credit market due to some of the inefficiencies of the carbon credit market. However, most charities don't have the resources to extend or alter their donation systems, let alone work with a new product.

Most carbon credit markets have underdeveloped tech, are not open to the public, or are opaque with how they source their credits. This presented an initial problem, which was solved when we found Toucan, our carbon credit market maker.

EcoPoints uses Toucan

Toucan is the best choice because it is one of the most advanced markets available to the public. It allows us to retire high-quality carbon credits in a decentralized manner. Learn more about Toucan here.

Caveats

Let's address some of the issues facing EcoPoints.

Are carbon credits a scam?

There are certainly glaring issues with carbon credits. For example, avoidance carbon credits are credits that are awarded when a resource like a forest isn't used (cut down). This presents a variety of issues: are we sure that avoiding one forest's destruction stops a different forest's destruction? No, we're not.

This is why we only use carbon credits that are sequestering carbon credits, which are projects that naturally store carbon into the Earth, like planting trees. Learn more about the Natural Carbon Tonne credits that we use on Toucan's report.

Toucan uses blockchain... aren't they bad for the environment?

Blockchains are not inherently bad for the environment, but they've gotten a bad reputation from "Proof of Work" systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum (v1.0). Proof of Work (PoW) blockchains secure themselves with costly computations that can be bad for the environment due to their energy consumption.

Good thing Toucan doesn't use a Proof of Work blockchain! The amount of energy that Toucan uses when retiring carbon credits is comparable to a few Google searches.

How do I know that carbon credits were actually used when I make my purchase?

Good question- this is something that we're working on making visually apparent. The reason this isn't shown is because it's a very technical screen. If you want, you can track the EcoPoints wallet to track all of its transactions to see how our carbon credits are being redeemed.