Most of us know what a carbon footprint is: the impact on climate change of the human activities and processes.

The Paris Agreement, at international level, and the Green Deal, at the European level, are focused on the reduction of the carbon footprint of the products and organizations, to decrease the amount of GHG emissions released in the atmosphere.

Currently, our interests as society, consumers and companies, are the actions that need to be implemented to reduce the negative impacts. However, there is a new perspective that is advancing and that open new opportunities: the carbon handprint.

Carbon handprints are understood as “beneficial environmental impacts that organizations can achieve and communicate by providing products and services that reduce footprints of others” and can use in a complementary way with carbon footprint to credibly demonstrate the positive impacts generated by companies.

Greg Norris directs SHINE (the Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise) at MIT, where he advances and applies methods for creating handprints, which are positive sustainability impacts outside the scope of the actor’s footprint. He has also taught Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and handprinting at Harvard for the past 25 years. Norris co-founded and is Director of Science at Earthster.org, a web-based platform democratizing LCA. He is a Fellow of the Mind and Life Institute, which seeks to build a scientific understanding of the mind to reduce suffering and promote well-being. In 2012 Time Magazine named his work on Handprints as one of “10 ideas that are changing your life.”

Next Tea Corner #94 - Avoided Emissions and Handprints: Companies reducing own and others’ footprints.
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