Overall, Raw Office’s platform provides customers with access to a wide select of eco products for their offices, while providing them with an average 20% financial savings and 50% time savings. Since 2016, Raw Office clients have experienced a 90% decrease in ordering mistakes and been able to increase the recycled content of their purchasing by 229% recycled content.
Raw Office has reviewed and systematically ECO scored more than 80,000 office products from hundreds of manufacturers to offer customers better, more sustainable options. Raw Score ratings reveal the eco-friendliness of every product we sell. We have high standards, approximately 7% of products curated meet our top 5-star Raw Score rating and most eco-forward products sold are better than conventional alternatives.
The overall finding is that Raw Office customers are encouraged to chose more eco-forward products in comparison to what they might have bought previously from other suppliers. Raw Office also has a live tracker on its website (see this page) that shows all the good our customers are doing for the environment. The display is a running total from the past year and reflects what’s been realized by Raw Office customers through their purchasing over this time period:
For full details see here
We developed an extensive and comprehensive scoring system to ensure that all of the products on The Raw Office are eco forward. The RAW ECO SCORE helps customers pick products that adhere to high standards, which allows customers to buy with full transparency. To avoid greenwashing, we dug up every environmental claim, label, and certification on the 80,000+ products that we curated for possible inclusion on The Raw Office. In classifying these based on impact, we developed a point system to rank the sustainability factor of each product on our website. A rating of 3.5 stars means that the product has a higher Raw Score than 91% of the hundreds of thousands of conventional office products on the market today.
We only select products manufactured with a minimum of fifty percent-recycled materials or agricultural fibers - except for inks, toner, soaps, and sanitizers, of course. These get a pass on our recycled content baseline as they are office must-haves and fit some of our other criteria for ranking: such as reduced packaging, non-toxic and natural ingredients, or local production.
The RAW ECO SCORE takes into account the degree to which products, manufactures, and customers are eco-forward. Eco Forward means that you are balancing social, environmental, and economic factors. RAW ECO SCORE includes the following criteria:
Product Examples – see the following to review a product’s Raw Eco Score, Recycled Content Percentage and Greenhouse Gas Decreased:
2. SKU: MRC610
Raw Office uses Artificial Intelligence to assess new and prospective customer company’s previous purchases and supply needs. We help customers to consider both identical and green product options at discounted rates to help them make more informed purchasing choices. After reviewing the potential financial savings and benefits of switching to more eco-forward product option, customers can easily place orders and re-orders from through a pre-populated individually curated program. Raw Office thus saves customers time on browsing and comparing, and makes it easy to deliver products to various company locations.
The ECO checklist is a free tool that allows customers to analyze how green their company is and identifies opportunities for improvement through practices and purchasing. See here
Beyond the increase in sustainable purchasing, 100% of all product related greenhouse gas emissions are also offset by Raw Office at no additional cost to customers. This enables customers to support climate action and make progress on their company sustainability goals through their purchasing.
See below and link for Carbon Neutral Blog Post here
Raw Office Is Now Carbon Positive!
Posted by Jeff Golfman on Apr 04, 2019
At Raw Office, we are committed to using business as a force for good. We believe that taking a leadership and ownership position to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is necessary and important.
As such, we are excited to share that we have embarked on an industry first initiative to ensure that the products we sell contribute more benefit to the environment than they cause harm. We have looked at the emissions from the 82,000+ products that we offer, to do a life cycle assessment of the greenhouse gas carbon emissions throughout our value chain.
We are extra excited to report that at no cost to our clients, we have taken full responsibility for our greenhouse gas emissions by offsetting the emissions associated with every product that we sell. Were even purchasing more carbon credits than we need to make sure we are reducing more greenhouse gas than our sales and distribution create—making us, and your products carbon positive!
Now, every time you make a purchase through Raw Office, we not only purchase enough carbon credits to offset the carbon emissions of your order, but we are also reducing emissions beyond this measure to guarantee we are reducing emissions as a company more than we create them. Best of all its at no cost to our customers.
We actually started doing this in August 2018, yet we spent the last several months working behind the scenes to fine tune this initiative prior to today’s public release.
All Raw Office customers with a Raw Switch account and a curated Favorites list will now be able to see the greenhouse gas numbers for all the products they purchase.
Every product page on The Raw Office website shows you how many pounds of greenhouse gas each product produces, and thus how much greenhouse gas we will offset upon purchase of your selection.
The emissions calculations we are using take into account the emissions from raw materials, processing, production, intermediate shipping, packaging and delivery to your doorstep. Our life cycle assessments have covered the greenhouse gas emissions from a product’s “cradle,” to the “gate,” or a “Cradle-to- gate” scope of calculation.
We are financing two carbon offset projects at no costs to our Raw Office clients.
One is provided by Bonneville Environmental Foundation. Bonneville is a 1% for the Planet non-profit member, and working with them allows us to honor part of our annual commitment to donating 1% of our revenues to environmental non-profits around the world.
Through Bonneville, we are supporting a number of landfill gas recovery projects throughout the American north-west, that capture methane emissions from landfills. When captured, this methane, which is a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide, is burned and destroyed. When methane is burned, it turns into carbon dioxide, reducing the impact of landfill gas by 30 times. In addition to simply flaring methane, some of Bonneville’s projects use the methane captured to produce energy, avoiding the need to use traditional fossil fuels for power.
We are also supporting landfill gas projects in China through Umwelt-Project-Management GmbH (UPM) Project, a renown German project developer with over 20 years of experience in carbon markets. Half of our offsets fees will be directed to UPM’s landfill gas project in Jiyuan (Northern China). The Jiyuan project not only captures methane, it also provides grid-connected renewable biogas to the local population. The local province is largely fuelled by dirty fossil fuels, and UPM’s project eliminates new fossil fuel development, by capturing naturally occurring biogas from human waste that goes to landfill and using that for energy instead.
Together, we are helping to find more efficient, renewable forms of energy that are more cost-effective than fossil fuels and distributing them to the parts of the world most likely to otherwise use dirty energy inputs.
To make this all possible we worked with Carbon Credit Capital to collect data on the individual products we sell. We analyzed emissions from the stage of the products’ raw materials, the processing of those raw materials into intermediate products, the emissions from manufacture of finished goods as well as the shipping emissions.
We have taken a deep dive into the supply chains of more than 100 of our top selling products across every category we offer to do a life cycle assessment of the greenhouse gas emissions from raw materials, to a final product your doorstep. With these 100+ product emissions calculations, we have extrapolated the carbon calculations explicitly across over 8,500 like-products, and generally across all 82,000+ SKUs available on our platform.
We’ve tracked each products shipping emissions between each stage of production, and from warehouse, to distribution center, to your office. Our calculations were made with data from our own operations, our distributors, and our product manufacturers. Where specific data points were unavailable, such as the exact plastic mixture of a pen, we used publicly available information on materials processing, and proprietary emissions factors provided by Carbon Credit Capital to create the most accurate as possible.
In the near future, we will release new features that will provide metrics for you to track your cumulative green house gas emissions and reductions over time on your user dashboard.
On a monthly, quarterly or annual basis, we will add up all of the emissions of every product that you buy and will show you the environmental impact of the purchases and how much carbon has been reduced through your purchases.
Soon we will also allow you to track percentage recycled content, number of locally made items and total eco items that your have purchased over time.
Stay tuned for announcements on the launch date for these exciting features.
We also plan to continue to further refine and develop specific product calculations for every one of our 82,000+ products, and we will update the calculations we have already made as more primary data becomes available from our distributors and manufacturers. As we progress towards exact product emissions calculations, we welcome collaboration with the OEMs we distribute to help us replace our assumptions with transparent data about their own emissions outputs.
Carbon Credit Capital is a Manhattan-based carbon footprint management company with over 10 years of experience in voluntary carbon markets.
They help companies calculate the carbon footprint of their operations, products, and services, and develop carbon pricing models for brands and consumers alike to make everyday purchases carbon neutral.
The world-class carbon offset projects they support not only reduce emissions, but also provide local communities with healthier environments, economies, and futures.
Carbon Credit Capital is on a mission to increase global understanding and adoption of carbon emissions reductions strategies that help corporations, universities, non-profits, individuals and governmental bodies reduce their carbon emissions towards zero, in ways that are logistically feasible and financially affordable.
If you are interested to learn more, you can find a list of our assumptions made to make the calculations that make this all possible below:
