Staff of Life store manager Russel Kreitman believes the store's carbon reduction program can be a valuable contribution to the local sustainability effort. Photo by Chip Scheuer.
Most people have heard by now of the concept of reducing humans’ “carbon footprint.” For years, it’s been talked about most often in relation to big companies, but there’s an increasing focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions at smaller and even individual levels.
Now, local grocery icon Staff of Life, which already operates in a fully green building, is blazing a whole new trail toward environmental sustainability with their CUTURCO2 program, an all-volunteer carbon reduction program that allows their customers to participate in a small-scale version of the carbon credit system.
When the customers purchase groceries, they have an option to offset the gas they burned driving to the grocery store. The rate is 25 cents per mile. So if, for example, someone lives five miles away, they would tell the cashier that they would like to buy 10 miles’ worth of carbon credits, which would be $2.50. It is then added to their bill.
“Maybe it’s only a small impact, but let’s say this was being done in each town in California, that would make a major impact,” says James Honroth, floor manager at Staff of Life.
The money from CUTURCO2 is given directly to local organization Ecology Action, to be used in its Boltage program. Ecology Action’s mission is to reduce the community’s carbon footprint by educating businesses, schools and government agencies on ways they can better go green. The Boltage program, where all the Staff of Life carbon reduction money goes, focuses on educating children. They go to schools and teach kids about the importance of walking and riding their bikes instead of getting rides from their parents. They even set up a system at their school that electronically tracks how often kids ride their bike to school and awards them prizes for doing so.
“The owners at Staff of Life are interested in creating ways to keep the community sustainable,” says store manager Russel Kreitman. “It [Boltage] was something we could see in our community, and it works.”
This concept of purchasing carbon credits and offsetting carbon usage has been enacted on much larger scales. Part of what makes Staff of Life’s program so appealing is that because of how small it is, there is no large committee or bureaucracy to tie the money up, and the customers know exactly where their money is going, and what it’s being used for.
“Any time you are doing a large-scale program like the carbon tax program that they keep talking about in Congress, you have to get together any number of people to agree on something, and in that case it can be held up in legislation. It can be all these variables involved there, because you’re dealing with a large area,” Honoroth says.
The concept of carbon credits is confusing to some people, which is in part why Staff of Life calls it a carbon reduction program instead of carbon credit program. But they operate on a similar concept. When a person or business buys credits for the carbon they’ve used, those credits aren’t wiping out those carbon emissions, but rather they are used to reduce carbon emissions elsewhere.
“It takes out future emissions, cuts down on future use of carbon,” Kreitman explains.
The effects of Boltage fall in line with this definition in that they not only reduce carbon usage by encouraging kids to ride their bikes more (and their parents to drive less), but it sets them up to be more environmentally aware as adults.
At this point, because the CUTURCO2 program is so new, it might seem to some like an odd way for customers to think about how they can reduce their carbon usage in their daily lives. But the Staff of Life folks don’t mind being ahead of the curve.
“Who knows?” Kreitman says. “In five to 10 years, carbon offsetting your purchases could be the new norm.”
