We vote with our wallets, so let’s make sure we’re voting for the right people…
At Delve we believe in the power that collective action has to motivate change on a large scale. We also believe that where we spend our money is one of the strongest ways for our voices to be heard, and making a conscious effort to only support businesses which reflect our values is the best way to transition to a greener, fairer economy for everyone.
We’ve built our entire tech stack around those principles, and are obsessed with figuring out which companies are deserving of our support, and which have more (sometime a lot more) work to do before they are.
We are fed up with tenuous marketing claims about sustainability, and think that companies that are really serious about making a positive impact on the world will have spent enough time understanding their impact that they should have some independently verified way of confirming their claims.
We are building a joined up database of independent climate and environmental certifications and rankings that we use to score different merchants on. We then use some clever machine learning tools to figure out how similar companies are to one another, and use that to make personalised recommendations for changes you can make to your purchasing habits to reduce your impact, and spend your money with businesses that reflect your values.
There is a huge amount of nuance and complexity in assessing impact in different industries, so we delegate that process to the wealth of great certifications that already exist, and focus on making the results super accessible and relevant to our users.
Here’s a rundown of some of our favourite certifications that we use to assess companies:
Certified BCorps
The BCorp certification is issued by not-for-profit B-Lab, based on a comprehensive assessment of a company’s operations based on social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. Companies must apply to B-Lab, are scored against each of these categories individually, and can become a “certified BCorp” if they meet a minimum threshold when all of those scores are added together. At Delve we give additional weighting to only the environmental component of BCorps scores.
At the time of writing there are around 3400 certified BCorps, and we think this is one of the most rounded and effective ways a company can validate their sustainability claims.
Find out more on their website
Fashion Transparency Index
The fashion transparency index is an annual report that assess the 250 largest fashion retailers on a range of categories including:
- Direct and supply-chain renewable energy usage.
- At what levels they publish greenhouse gas emissions.
- Whether they have a public and trackable commitment to decarbonisation.
Find out more on their website.
Carbon Neutral Certified
Climate Neutral is a nonprofit organization working to eliminate carbon emissions.
Climate Neutral works to eliminate global carbon emissions by getting brands to measure, offset, and reduce the carbon they emit. They have built a simple set of tools and a certification that makes carbon footprinting more accessible, sets clear guidelines for carbon offsetting, and inspires brands to work on reducing emissions directly.
When a brand gets certified, it achieves zero net carbon emissions for all of the carbon it creates while making and delivering its products or services for a year. The Climate Neutral Certified label makes it easy for consumers to find certified brands.
Find out more on their website.
Carbon Disclosure Project
CDP is a not-for-profit charity that runs the global disclosure system for investors, companies, cities, states and regions to manage their environmental impacts.
Find out more on their website.
Join Delve today to start reducing your impact
Delve is a climate tech startup accelerating the transition to net zero by empowering people to make climate positive choices in their everyday lives.
Our app securely connects to your bank accounts using secure Open Banking APIs to effortlessly track and reduce the emissions from your purchases and lifestyle.
