Belgrave Trust

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Belgrave Trust

Type	Private
Headquarters	New York City, United States
Founder(s)	Nick Baily Jeffrey A. Stewart
Key people	Peter C. Fusaro Jason Calacanis Neil Capel Craig Kanarick Erik Dochtermann Patricia Ju Christopher Baily
Industry	E-commerce Green enterprise Social enterprise
Products	Eco Friendly Products Carbon offset subscriptions Carbon offset gifts
Slogan(s)	"Reward Innovation. Reverse Impact. Restore Balance."
Website	www.belgravetrust.com
Alexa rank	6,117,088 (August 2012)^[1]
Type of site	E-Commerce
Available in	English
Launched	November, 2009
Current status	Active

Belgrave Trust is a social enterprise firm that uses carbon offsets to allow individuals to live carbon neutral, through subscriptions and environmentally conscious products bundled with offsets. The firm's principal business is conducted through a retail website that offers a curated selection of physical items as well as personal and gift subscriptions. Revenues derived from subscribers and through the sale of products are used to offset greenhouse gasses through the purchase and retirement of carbon offset securities that fund projects creating clean energy or reducing emissions.

Products and services

The firm offers four main areas of service:

Environmentally Conscious Products: A curated line of products created with environmentally conscious practices, each bundled with a carbon offset component that addresses a specific area of a home, office, or lifestyle^[2]

Carbon Neutral Membership Service: A subscription based service that calculates an across-the-board total estimate of the carbon footprint of an individual or household and enables support of an equivalent amount of emissions reduction through support of a portfolio of offset projects.^[3]

Gift Subscriptions / Memberships: Gift subscriptions, similar to the individual membership service but for use as a gift or "Sponsored Membership.^[4]

Corporate Sustainability Services: Through parent company Belgrave Climate Exchange, Inc. the firm offers a suite of analytic and assessment services for businesses working on CSR initiatives.^[5]

Timeline and organization

Belgrave Trust was founded by Nick Baily and Jeffrey A. Stewart^[6] and launched to the general public in November 2009.^[7] The company is based in New York City.

The firm's website first debuted in March 2009 as an invitation-only alpha, launched a public beta on November 5, 2009, and exited beta on January 20, 2010.^[8] The firm was co-founded^[9] by entertainment executive (and Huffington Post commentator) Nicholas Baily,^[10] and serial entrepreneur and longtime New York tech community participant Jeffrey A. Stewart, prolific angel investor^[11] and founder of technology startups including publicly traded Square Earth/Proxicom and online print service Mimeo.com.^[12]

Other supporters and staff^[13] include green trading expert Peter Fusaro, Chairman of Global Change Associates and author of 15 books including New York Times bestseller "What Went Wrong at Enron" and "Cut Carbon, Grow Profits";^[14] former CTO of exclusive invitation-only social network aSmallWorld.net Neil Capel; Serial entrepreneur and pundit Jason Calacanis; original digital media icon and Razorfish founder Craig Kanarick; Erik Dochtermann, CEO of luxury advertising and marketing firm KD&E.^[15]

The firm announced debuted a line of environmentally conscious physical products and launched a new store in November 2010.^[2]

Values and approach

The company's focus on the affluent manifests in what the founders have termed an "alignment of values" with the wealthy, which the firm describes through three tag phrases, which appear throughout their marketing materials.

Ease Through Simplicity: An extreme concern with a very simple and fast method for calculating and individual's carbon footprint, contrasted with the sequential questionnaire approach, and transactional (rather than subscription) model used by first generation retail voluntary offset services such as TerraPass and Native Energy. The firm refers to an "actuarial" (akin to insurance risk assessment) model for providing carbon footprint estimates by a "drill-down" method, and maintains that this method produces equivalent accuracy to other means.

Strength From Diversification: The firm espouses an "actively managed portfolio" of offsets^[16] diversified across various types of emissions abatement programs, in varied regions. The company lists multiple projects within this portfolio and several certification standards, though the company has yet to publish its first audited report of its carbon trading and retirement activities.

Innovation Via Markets: Another contrast between Belgrave Trust and similar offset resellers—also divergent from the core left/progressive suspicion of unfettered market forces—is an unabashed advocacy of markets as the clear "best" solution for addressing climate change, and on their site compares the carbon offset market to the discovery of oil, noting that in both cases market forces are capable of bringing about rapid environmental change through technology.^[17]

Launch of products and attention for Apple initiative

In the fall of 2010 the firm made its first foray into selling physical products through a limited edition line, created in partnership with New York based artist and designer Jason Douglas Griffin.^[2] Coinciding with a ground-up rebranding and a relaunch of their main site ^[18] the line's approach was to "pair carbon neutrality with sustainable design" and the firm cited the initiative as a means to raise awareness of climate change solutions and broaden the market for support of carbon mitigating products.

The launch was met with favorable press attention from enviro outlets such as Treehugger and Discovery Networks as well as design based media such as GOOD magazine and "new ideas" and tech outlets such as PSFK and Techcrunch.

One item in specific, however, landed the company in the spotlight. The LaptopNeutral sticker, designed to offset the emissions for Apple's popular line of aluminum-bodied notebook computers, crossed over from niche attention and became one of 2010's notable climate change stories when it was picked up by TIME Magazine. Time's climate change reporter Bryan Walsh penned a story entitled "Why Your Mac May Not Be as Clean As You Think".^[19] In the story, Walsh notes that "manufacturing aluminum is extremely energy-intensive, and as laptops shift from plastic casing to aluminum, their carbon footprints expand," citing Belgrave Trust's research and comments from Mr. Baily:

The Belgrave Trust, a New York-based social enterprise that calculates carbon footprints and offers carbon offsets, estimates that aluminum-cased laptops like MacBook Air can cause 42% more greenhouse gas emissions in their manufacture than identical plastic-cased versions. In fact, Belgrave estimates that if Apple sells 10 million aluminum-cased items as expected this holiday season, the company would have a bigger carbon footprint from those products alone than a major airline like British Airways or Air France. "It's a lot more energy-intensive than you imagine," says Nick Baily, Belgrave Trust's founder. "The emissions really add up over time. People don't realize that computers are responsible for around 5% of the world's carbon emissions."^[20]

The story was picked up by other hard news outlets such as Reuters, and as of January, 2011 no response or comment from Apple had been cited in contemporaneous media.

Offsets for the affluent

The company has drawn attention for choosing to focus on the affluent as its primary audience.

During the firm's invitation-only beta period, it had participated in partnerships with firms such as Cirrus Aviation and Aston Martin.^[21] Belgrave Trust first received press attention from luxury and wealth oriented media, including Luxist.com, JustLuxe, and Lussorian, and has received much of its coverage from consumer product and financial themed media, also including Crain's New York Business and Inc Magazine.

The company may be the first to coin the term "Luxury Carbon" in the context of a consumer product or service.

The firm has acknowledged that catering to the wealthy may be controversial but counters by alleging that the wealthy bear a disproportionate share of the blame for climate change, and that a service targeting the affluent specifically is a necessity.^[22] Founder & CEO Nick Baily, in a speech at the Wall Street Green Trading Summit in 2008, spoke directly to both sides of this point, stating: "So why go straight to the affluent? Because it’s precisely those who have had the most impact that have the means to create a solution.".^[22] This line of reasoning has been common in press interviews with Baily and Stewart, with Baily telling financial news anchor Maria Bartiromo in a televised NBC interview: "The top seven percent of the world's affluent are responsible for half of its carbon footprint. If you're not addressing that, you're missing the point."^[23]

Belgrave Trust's approach has also been covered and discussed in the core environmental community. Mainstream environmental news outlets have expressed support, though often acknowledging the likely negative feelings towards the wealthy. For example, Treehugger.com says: "The dirty, stinking rich! Yeah, I said it! They are always getting called-out for their imbalanced percentage of environmental destruction," though they follow with: "Love it or hate it - the mega-rich hold the key for a game changer with carbon emissions." Other environmental commentators such as Corporate Sustainability Wire and have been more unequivocal in their praise.

Major competitors

References

External links

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