We're Officially Climate Neutral Certified

At Seek More Wilderness, we believe everyone deserves wild places. That's why we provide outdoor goods that protect public lands. Since 50% of all profits are donated to defending the wild, we make it as easy as possible for outdoor enthusiasts to gear up and support the wild places they adventure.

One of the largest threats to our public lands is climate change. We believe that businesses can be a part of the solution - not the problem - to the climate crisis. And we wanted to make sure the gear we provide to our customers is a part of that solution.

That's why we're proud to announce we are officially Climate Neutral Certified.

We’re working with Climate Neutral, an independent non-profit organization, whose mission is to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon world by recruiting companies to publicly measure, reduce, and offset their carbon emissions. They manage an independent and rigorous certification program that verifies a company has achieved net-zero carbon emissions for the entirety of a company’s carbon footprint. Climate Neutral provides the Climate Neutral Certified label to communicate to customers that a brand is committed to a set of immediate and long-term actions to reverse climate change.

This spring, we measured our 2020 emissions and purchased carbon offsets to become completely net-zero for 2020. This is our second year completing the Climate Neutral Certification process. We also created an action plan to reduce our climate emissions going forward. We’ll continue measuring, reducing, and offsetting our carbon emissions every year indefinitely.

Check out our Climate Neutral Certification.

How it works:

We’ve completed a three-step process with Climate Neutral to effectively become net-zero. We began by measuring our entire carbon footprint — from the goods we make to the office we power to our order shipments to customers. Then, we created a carbon reduction plan to shrink our carbon footprint as much as possible, and we purchase carbon offsets for the rest. Carbon offsets are investment projects that either prevent carbon from being emitted (like investing in renewable energy projects) or remove carbon from the atmosphere (like planting trees).

Where we are and where we’re going:

We’ve taken sustainability very seriously since Seek More Wilderness opened its online storefront in 2016. Our office is already powered by solar energy (we put the panels up ourselves!). We also use sustainable packaging to ship our goods, choosing to use 100% recycled, biodegradable packages.

In our 2021 reduction action plan, we're focusing on eliminating overnighting (a carbon-intensive shipping process) and completing a packaging audit of how we ship our products. In our 2020 reduction action plan, we eliminated extraneous plastic from our shipping and analyzed our supply chain to identify and work with low-carbon suppliers as much as possible. And thanks to Climate Neutral, we’re offsetting all the CO2 we consume.

FAQ:

Why is it so important to deal with climate change?

The world requires immediate and radical solutions to deal with climate change, especially our public lands. In the three years since 195 nations committed in Paris to cap global temperature increases at 2 degrees Celsius—while also agreeing to aim for 1.5 degrees—a few things have become resoundingly clear: 1) The world must quickly stop burning fossil fuels, and 2) we need additional solutions to draw down the existing level of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere.

What is Climate Neutral and what does it do?

It’s a non-profit organization we're working with that enlists companies and consumers in the fight against climate change by helping measure, reduce, and offset our entire carbon footprint. Climate Neutral’s label empowers socially conscious consumerism. The Climate Neutral Certified label has the potential to harness the buying power of more than 230 million Americans who currently express concern about climate change.

What does it mean to be committed?

Climate Neutral certifies companies annually. We’ve measured, reduced and offset our emissions for the past two years. Now, we’ll repeat the process every year to continue measuring, reducing and offsetting our carbon emissions.

What are offsets and are they really real?

Carbon offsets are a way to pay someone to remove carbon from the atmosphere or prevent greenhouse gases from getting there in the first place. All credits that we purchase through Climate Neutral go through rigorous third-party verification to ensure Climate Neutral Certified brands are buying offsets that represent real emission reductions. There are dozens of ways to reduce emissions around the world. Some projects capture carbon, like planting trees. Some reduce emissions, like replacing open cooking fires with low-emissions cookstoves. Some do both, like improving farming techniques.

Shouldn't we focus on policy change?

We believe climate change is an existential threat to our planet, and by extension, our public lands. We want to address it in each and every way possible. Policy is a very important piece of the puzzle, but it's subject to political winds and slow to produce. The global climate crisis deserves a more rapid response. We will continue to educate and advocate for our public lands and the climate crisis, but we’re also doing our part to reduce our own footprint now.

Shouldn't we focus on internal reductions?

Absolutely! The first step of working with Climate Neutral was measuring what Seek More Wilderness' entire carbon footprint is — from making our goods to running our office to shipping them to you. After we measured our footprint this spring, we came up with a reduction plan to reduce as much of our emissions as we can in 2020 — like removing plastic from our packaging and identifying lower-carbon suppliers for our goods. We’ll continually be reducing our footprint to get it as close to zero as we can - and in the meantime, we’ll be purchasing carbon offsets for everything else.