If a company wants to reduce its carbon footprint, it may buy carbon credits issued by Verra, the world’s largest carbon crediting program. Those credits could be for projects like renewable energy or forest restoration, letting a company claim the environmental benefits from a newly built wind farm or trees planted on once-cleared land.
Now there’s a new option: carbon credits for rescued food, which help fund organizations that collect would-be food waste and distribute it to people in need.
Those Verra-issued credits are now available thanks to Brightly, a Boston-based startup founded in 2023 by Andy Levitt, who previously founded and led Purple Carrot, a plant-based meal kit company.
Brightly already has contracts with 25-plus food rescue organizations, including Feeding America. But now its food waste carbon credits are being issued by Verra, making them the first of their kind under the carbon standard’s methodology for reducing food loss and waste.
Carbon credits come with some controversy. Research has found that some projects haven’t delivered real climate benefits; experts say the option of credits can enable greenwashing.
Levitt knows there’s distrust in the carbon market, but Brightly’s solution, he says, creates a “virtuous loop of activity” that funds even more food rescue, allowing nonprofits to feed more people.
“We’re now able to provide a novel solution for corporations who want to focus on addressing both the environment and hunger together,” Levitt says. “It’s a whole new category and class of carbon credits that exists in the market.”
The issue of food waste
Up to 40% of all the food produced in the United States never gets eaten. Some of that food is never harvested on farms; some may expire at grocery stores before it sells; some may be taken into a household, but end up in a trash can or curbside compost bin.
The majority of wasted food (about 60%) goes to landfill, where it emits methane, a greenhouse gas that is 28 times as potent as carbon dioxide when it comes to warming the planet.
Reducing this food waste is a clear way to address climate change. Globally, food waste accounts for 6% to 10% of worldwide emissions. Aviation, for comparison, accounts for about 3%.
At the same time, tens of millions of Americans have limited or uncertain access to food, relying on food banks or food pantries—which often rescue some of that wasted food—to supplement their groceries. Feed America estimates some 50 million Americans got charitable food assistance in 2023.
Many of those organizations, though, struggle with funding, especially as they see an increased demand due to rising food prices and general economic stress.
“Every CEO [of a food bank] that we spoke to confirmed that they need more funding, and that they could recover more food if they had more money,” Levitt says.
Addressing the environment and hunger
Brightly says its solution addresses both sides of that coin.
“Our goal is to create sustainable funding for nonprofit food rescue organizations, allowing them to keep food out of landfill and feed people that are hungry,” Levitt says.
By funding food rescue, Brightly says it prevents the methane emitted from food waste from entering the atmosphere in the first place.
A key part of an effective carbon credit is the issue of additionality, meaning the emission reduction would not have happened anyway without the carbon credit revenue.
Brightly says it quantifies its carbon credit benefits by collecting a three-year history of a food rescue organization’s activity, establishing a baseline for that nonprofit’s environmental benefit. It credits only environmental impact above that baseline.
Such nonprofits collect all different types of food; some may focus on produce, others on dry goods. Those all come with their own environmental impact.
Brightly analyzes all the data from the organizations about what they’ve rescued and how much and assigns a climate impact to every type of food, from bread to meat.
“It’s treated at a very hyperspecific, line-by-line, food-item-by-food-item level, to get that granularity of accuracy and conservativeness to earn a high-quality carbon credit rating,” Levitt says.
Companies from food manufacturers to grocery stores to even those outside the food industry like apparel companies could purchase Brightly’s food waste credits.
Brightly returns up to 80% of that revenue from the credit’s sale to the food rescue organizations, funding their efforts and allowing them to expand.
The amount the average food nonprofit might get in dollars is difficult to specify, Levitt says, because the carbon credits aren’t created for each organization; instead, that organization’s actions are one part under a larger credit umbrella.
Carbon credits are controversial
That idea of additionality is part of what has made environmental markets at large a controversial climate solution.
Climate experts have argued, for example, that companies shouldn’t claim credits for renewable energy projects, because wind and solar are already the cheapest kind of energy to build, and so would likely get built even without being funded by a credit.
But there are other issues with the carbon market. One is the timeline: Forest projects often are set for a 100-year timeline to ensure that the carbon those trees take in stays out of the atmosphere for long enough to benefit the planet.
The forests used for those projects, though, may burn up in wildfires before that timeline ends, releasing all that stored carbon back into the air.
To be sure, Brightly credits work on a shorter time horizon. Food is either being eaten, rotting in a landfill, or perhaps being composted, so the climate impact is more immediate.
Still, “the dominant majority of voluntary carbon credits do not deliver what they promise,” Danny Cullenward, an economist and lawyer who looks at the scientific integrity of climate policy, says via email. One recent literature review, for example, found that fewer than 16% of carbon credits represent real climate benefits.
Carbon credits also don’t do much if the buyers see them as an excuse to keep polluting, he adds. Companies often say that they are offsetting their emissions (carbon offsets are the benefit created by a carbon credit) as a way to reduce their overall carbon footprint, without actually changing how they operate and pollute.
Experts have also expressed concerns about credits matching what a company produces, especially for something tangible like plastic credits. Is it really beneficial, for example, if a company that produces plastic sachets (flexible packets for things like ketchup or shampoo samples) claims a credit that focuses on collecting and recycling plastic bottles?
With Brightly’s credits, the main issue being addressed is food waste, which produces methane, but the credits are still for reductions of carbon dioxide (CO2) or CO2 equivalent. The warming impact of methane (CH4) can be measured as a CO2 equivalent, which Brightly says it does.
But methane and CO2 are not physically equivalent, Cullenward says. Methane contributes more to warming, but it doesn’t last as long: methane’s lifespan in the atmosphere is seven to 12 years, whereas carbon dioxide emissions can last for centuries.
Cullenward worries that a credit focused on cutting methane will enable companies to keep emitting CO2, trading a short-term benefit for a longer-term climate impact.
“We need to cut both kinds of emissions, but any claim that it’s okay to emit carbon dioxide (which creates permanent harms) because we have cut methane emissions (which has primarily short-term benefits) essentially mortgages the future,” he says.
A hyperlocal impact
Brightly has already analyzed more than 5 billion pounds of food recovery data, representing more than 1 million metric tons of avoided greenhouse gas emissions. And it has contracted forward sales of more than 80,000 credits.
With the news that Verra is issuing Brightly credits, Levitt expects that impact to grow.
(Verra issues carbon credits after it certifies projects, but it doesn’t “approve” the credits. The nonprofit says to think of it like a building inspector and certificate of occupancy: A city doesn’t “approve” a house, but it certifies that it meets building codes and issues the documents that let that house be used.)
Brightly expects to issue 300,000 credits annually, based on food rescue projects in the United States. It’s working on projects abroad, as well.
Some companies have been retreating from their climate efforts, or growing quieter about climate change in general, especially under the Trump administration’s anti-climate change stance.
But as we get closer to 2030, when more corporate climate targets are coming due, Levitt believes “there is going to be a substantial increase in the demand for high integrity carbon credits.”
Levitt says there’s an additional benefit to Brightly’s credits, besides the environmental claims: the hyperlocal impact. Brightly’s food rescue partners cover 97% of the counties in America where lack of reliable access to food exists.
Whereas a carbon credit focused on a forest project might happen around the world from a company’s headquarters, Brightly’s impact might be focused on a food rescue organization in the same city. Companies could boast about feeding people in their own communities, too.
“We think there’s a really special role for these carbon credits that allows the corporations to talk about not only their commitment to the environment but also to addressing hunger,” Levitt says