Treepoints is the Netflix of carbon offsetting

It has become a badge of honour among high-flying tech entrepreneurs to be college dropouts. Anthony Collias and Jacob Wedderburn-Day are the exception. They first put their heads together at Oxford, both completed their degrees at Keble College, and yet despite this obvious excess of education have gone on to become co-founders of Treepoints, a carbon off-setting platform that looks set to become the Netflix of climate-amelioration.

Jacob was brought up in Kent while Anthony roamed around from Istanbul to Dubai to Holland. But their paths finally crossed amid dreaming spires, the Bodleian Library, and lectures on economics. In 2015, equipped with their Oxford degrees, having failed to either drop out or get booted out, they walked straight into internships with big investment institutions before saying to themselves, “This sucks!” as Anthony puts it. “We’ve got to do our own thing.”

At least they got to drop out of investment banking. Anthony found a flat in King’s Cross and Jacob started a masters course at UCL. They had a lot of their old friends turning up and couch-surfing as they passed through London and, annoyingly, stashing their luggage. But they were also planting a seed, which grew into a start-up project for a competition and in 2017 became Stasher: a luggage storage network that means you can leave your stuff somewhere safely and cheaply and not have to lug it around – and especially not dump it on Jacob or Anthony.

It was a brilliant idea – but one that got hit hard by Covid-19 and the enforced clampdown on international travel.

Anthony says: “It went from ‘exciting market’ to ‘it’s just a website’ almost overnight but it will pick up through 2022 and 23.”

Jacob has a sense of humour about it: “The idea was to do something that would get us financial security and then do something else that would have real impact on the back of it. Of course, we didn’t get the security, as it turned out, but we decided to go ahead and think about making the impact anyway.”

They knew they wanted to do something to tackle climate change but at the same time they felt a disconnect with a certain guilt-inducing holier-than-thou tendency among some climate activists.

Anthony says that they learned a lesson from his personal experience: “I had significantly reduced my meat consumption – largely because my local supermarket had made it easy by reducing the price and increasing the range of meat alternatives. It has to be easy or people won’t do it.” Jacob underlines the statistical point: “It’s more effective to get 100 per cent of people to reduce their meat by 20 per cent than to persuade 5 per cent of people to go fully vegan – and that way you don’t alienate anyone.”

Which is how they came to be wondering if they could apply the same basic principle to greenhouse gas emissions and make it affordable and easy for consumers to cut them. Treepoints, which they set up in 2020 while the pandemic was squeezing Stasher, was their answer.

Anthony says: “People are used to the model of video-streaming so we decided to use that.” Treepoints is a subscription service that can cost less than Netflix or Amazon.

Treepoints is for people and businesses who want to decarbonise. Brewdog, Patagonia and Hotel Chocolat have already signed up as have I. It’s easy to do. The first button: “Calculate my impact,” works out how many tonnes of CO2 you are producing annually by asking how much you fly, cycle, eat vegetarian etc. Then it offers one of a series of plans for the impact. For £3.25 a month, I’ve already offset half a tonne of CO2 (it charges £6.50 per tonne). That is the equivalent of one flight from Paris to New York.

Treepoints, as the name suggests, plants a lot of trees but it doesn’t just plant trees.

Jacob says: “There’s a huge market of renewables and carbon-capture projects.” The WWF-certified projects it funds include windfarms, solar and hydroelectric generation and one scheme in Istanbul that converts landfill into electricity and spares the atmosphere over 800,000 tonnes of CO2 annually. A bonus is for plastic bottles to be removed from the environment before they end up in the ocean.

Planting trees is still the cheapest form of carbon capture but there’s a limit to how much trees can absorb. Other innovative high-tech approaches are becoming more viable.

The website gives advice on how to reduce your emissions and live more sustainably. “But we don’t think people have to give up flying,” says Anthony. “They might want to fly a little bit less. Just as you might want to improve your diet.”

There is another advantage. Jacob points out: “It’s a marketplace. You aggregate and you get more power. If you try and do it on your own it’s less effective.”

The Treepoints founders admit that carbon-offsetting has a bad rap. Anthony says: “Greenpeace thought it was letting big oil companies off the hook, providing a fig-leaf for airlines, but offsetting is not a licence to pollute. When you give to charity, most people don’t see that as an opportunity to behave badly.”

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The Treepoints philosophy is that in an imperfect world, perfection is hard to achieve but that shouldn’t stop you doing your bit. You don’t have to wear a hairshirt. “We’re not vegans who never fly,” the founders say.

Treepoints offers deals and rewards. You can earn points, which are a bit like airmiles but the opposite. Brewdog will give you vouchers worth £10 just for signing up. A store that sells toothpaste will plant two trees for every order. Big Yellow Self Storage is set to plant three trees for every sale on Box Shop.

Jacob says: “When it’s a challenging problem, there is a temptation to ignore it because it’s too huge. We think that making small steps, incremental improvements, gives people permission to think of themselves in a better light. They know that they are doing something.”

Businesses have to pay more than individuals since they will have a larger footprint; on the other hand they get a better deal per head. Anthony says: “There’s a lot of pressure on businesses, both from their own employees and consumers, to go greener. We are like an outsourcing initiative: we can take care of that for you. Big businesses get to build a brand and they are doing good.”

Anthony and Jacob want to get more closely involved in some of the carbon capture projects they are funding. Anthony says: “We want to see where we can make the most difference. So long as it seems like fun.”

@andymartinink