Products and services
The firm offered three main areas of service:
Environmentally conscious products: A line of products created with environmentally conscious practices, each bundled with a carbon offset component that addressed a specific area of a home, office, or lifestyle
Carbon neutral membership service: A subscription-based service that calculated an across-the-board total estimate of the carbon footprint of an individual or household and enables support of an equivalent amount of emissions reduction through the support of a portfolio of offset projects.
Corporate sustainability services: Through parent company Belgrave Climate Exchange, Inc. the firm offered a suite of analytic and assessment services for businesses working on CSR initiatives.
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Launch of products and attention for Apple initiative
In the fall of 2010, the firm made its first foray into selling physical products through a limited edition line, created in partnership with New York–based artist and designer Jason Douglas Griffin. Coinciding with a ground-up rebranding and a relaunch of their main site the line's approach was to "pair carbon neutrality with sustainable design" and the firm cited the initiative as a means to raise awareness of climate change solutions and broaden the market for support of carbon mitigating products.
The launch was met with favorable press attention from environmental outlets such as TreeHugger and Discovery Channel as well as design based media such as GOOD magazine and "new ideas" and tech outlets such as PSFK and TechCrunch.
One item in specific, however, landed the company in the spotlight. The Laptop Neutral sticker, designed to offset the emissions for Apple's popular line of aluminum-bodied notebook computers, crossed over from niche attention and became one of 2010's notable climate change stories when it was picked up by Time magazine. Time's climate change reporter Bryan Walsh penned a story entitled "Why Your Mac May Not Be as Clean As You Think". In the story, Walsh notes that "manufacturing aluminum is extremely energy-intensive, and as laptops shift from plastic casing to aluminum, their carbon footprints expand", citing Belgrave Trust's research and comments from Mr. Baily:
The Belgrave Trust, a New York-based social enterprise that calculates carbon footprints and offers carbon offsets, estimates that aluminum-cased laptops like MacBook Air can cause 42% more greenhouse gas emissions in their manufacture than identical plastic-cased versions. In fact, Belgrave estimates that if Apple sells 10 million aluminum-cased items as expected this holiday season, the company would have a bigger carbon footprint from those products alone than a major airline like British Airways or Air France. "It's a lot more energy-intensive than you imagine," says Nick Baily, Belgrave Trust's founder. "The emissions really add up over time. People don't realize that computers are responsible for around 5% of the world's carbon emissions."
