In 2022, zooplus, one of Europe’s leading online platforms for pet supplies, partnered with CEEZER to help mitigate its operational climate impact through a custom carbon portfolio designed to serve the company’s overall decarbonization efforts. 

The partnership started out with shifting zooplus’ carbon portfolio away from primarily avoidance credits to entirely removal credits, with CEEZER’s expert team providing support and advice throughout the process. This change has prepared zooplus to anticipate upcoming European and German climate-neutrality goals, while demonstrating its commitment to proactive and sustainable corporate practices. 

Here’s how zooplus built a portfolio incorporating emerging removal technologies on CEEZER’s leading carbon credit platform.

Maximizing climate impact through carbon removal

Carbon credits come in two forms: avoidance credits prevent future emissions (for example, by conserving forests or building renewable energy projects), while removal credits actively extract and store existing CO₂ from the atmosphere through methods like reforestation or direct air capture.

Before partnering with CEEZER, zooplus initially focused on avoidance carbon credits to mitigate its beyond-value-chain emissions. However, with the emergence of effective, accessible carbon removal options, zooplus aimed to integrate more impactful removal credits into its project portfolio, enhancing its contribution to climate action.  

zooplus used CEEZER's platform, which hosts more than 9,000 carbon projects, to find and evaluate potential investments. It ultimately selected Oregon Biochar Solutions, which has achieved two significant milestones: It was the first carbon removal project in the Americas to issue credits (in 2021), and the first American industrial-scale project to receive Puro.earth certification. Puro.earth's certification is important because it specifically validates industrial carbon removal methods, confirming that carbon credits from the project represent real, additional, and long-lasting carbon sequestration.

As an early supporter of Oregon Biochar Solutions, zooplus contributed to the project's financial viability and potential growth while simultaneously providing multiple environmental co-benefits, including improved soil health, reduced water pollution, and the displacement of fossil-based activated carbons. The project also matched with zooplus’ approach to carbon credit procurement, which stresses quality over quantity to increase the impact of its investment.

Emissions responsibility and compensation

Working with CEEZER, zooplus soon began allocating more budget towards high-quality removal-only carbon credit procurement, curating a diversified credit portfolio to increase climate impact. This portfolio strategy aligned with zooplus' emission scopes, prioritizing controllable emissions by addressing scope 1, 2 and targeted scope 3 categories (3.5-3.7). CEEZER's platform enabled zooplus to navigate the voluntary carbon market (VCM) and easily explore different scopes and project types while maintaining a clear corporate overview.

zooplus' sustainability team continues to proactively address the company's emissions by prioritizing carbon credits and aligning its portfolio with the company's emission areas. This strategic shift both compensates for the company’s environmental footprint, helps to scale critical emergent carbon removal technologies, and is an example of how companies can leverage carbon credits to offset emissions and support local and global conservation efforts.

zooplus also provides its customers with enhanced transparency on its carbon credit portfolio through its public portfolio page on CEEZER, thus improving trust and accountability. Internally, these portfolio insights also are helping to steer zooplus toward continued investment in the highest impact carbon removal solutions. 

A pathway to transitioning to removals and beyond

Today, zooplus is continuing to work with CEEZER to improve and fine-tune its carbon credit portfolio. Its success demonstrates how organizations worldwide can integrate tailored carbon credit portfolios into their transition plans. By conducting detailed analyses with scientific metrics, companies can align their portfolio compositions with directly controllable emissions for maximum impact. This strategy can even incorporate a transition model to gradually increase the share of removal credits over several years within a set budget.

How to effectively manage this transition in your company:

• Assess the budget. Are there opportunities to either target or expand investment to maximize impact?
• Track and report outcomes. Initiate preliminary spot- and forward-transactions for carbon removal to gauge efficacy, produce tangible results, and illustrate impacts to the board.
• Engage your CFO. Early conversations on climate accounting topics can lead sustainability and finance teams to work together to build and track strong portfolio results.
• Lean into CDR. Increase your portfolio’s share of carbon removal credits through strategic forward purchases and long-term offtakes (LTOs).
• Make the case. When it comes to climate impact, it’s important to buy credits for quality rather than quantity. Leverage your portfolio metrics to show why quality matters and the difference it makes.
• Share your journey Be sure to bring customers, employees, investors, and stakeholders into the loop. Build trust and transparency wherever possible through tools like a public portfolio page that shares outcomes backed by real-time data and highlights key metrics such as removal share and the distribution of the portfolio across Oxford Categories. 

As zooplus knows, we are all in this together. Sharing the journey ensures accountability, fosters trust and encourages us all to work harder to achieve global net-zero commitments on time. 

Interested in getting started? CEEZER is here to help. Schedule a demo today!