Cars & Transportation

Following other transportation-related partnerships with Expedia and Ford, the folks at TerraPass have partnered up with online shipping marketplace uShip to offer carbon offsets for shipping. Not to be confused with Carbonfree Shipping from carbonfund.org, which is available when you make purchases from select online retailers, and TransNeutral shipping, which is a commercial shipping venture, uShip members can list anything they need shipped, from household goods to vehicles to freight, and receive bids from feedback-rated shipping providers, including movers, carriers, transporters, van lines, freight brokers, etc. They also offer independent service providers to join up with them and bid on your shipping job, making it sort of a Craigslist for shipping. The new partnership program, called the TerraPass Certified Provider Program, enables uShip service providers to balance out the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the shipment of goods by funding clean energy and efficiency projects. uShip calculates the monthly carbon footprint of service providers enrolled in the program using the weight and distance of shipments booked through the company. These emissions are then balanced by TerraPass through various projects like domestic wind farms, biomethane projects, and other energy efficiency projects. While such a program won't do anything to extinguish the "carbon neutral: good or bad" debate (and may only add fuel to the fire), shipping is a huge, dirty industry, and we think it'd be awfully nice to be able to move, ship furniture and more with a cleaner conscience. ::Carbon Balanced Shipping with uShip and TerraPass via ::Green Car Congress