First Carbon Credits for Rescued Food Enter the Market
Brightly, a Boston-based startup, has become the first to issue Verra-certified carbon credits for avoided food waste, creating a new funding stream for food rescue nonprofits while raising questions about additionality and greenwashing in voluntary carbon markets.
A Boston-based startup has begun issuing the first carbon credits tied specifically to rescuing food that would otherwise be wasted, opening a new avenue for companies to offset emissions while funding nonprofits that distribute surplus food to people in need.
Brightly, founded in 2023 by Andy Levitt, announced that its food waste credits are now being issued by Verra, the world's largest carbon crediting program. The credits are the first of their kind under Verra's methodology for reducing food loss and waste, according to the company. Brightly already holds contracts with more than 25 food rescue organizations, including Feeding America.
The credits work by quantifying the methane emissions avoided when edible food is diverted from landfills and delivered to food banks and pantries instead. Up to 40% of all food produced in the United States is never eaten, and roughly 60% of that waste ends up in landfills, where it releases methane — a greenhouse gas approximately 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period. Globally, food waste accounts for 6% to 10% of emissions, compared with about 3% for aviation.
«We're now able to provide a novel solution for corporations who want to focus on addressing both the environment and hunger together,» Levitt said. «It's a whole new category and class of carbon credits that exists in the market.»
Under Brightly's model, companies — from food manufacturers and grocery chains to apparel brands outside the food sector — can purchase credits generated by food rescue activity. Brightly returns up to 80% of the revenue from credit sales to the participating nonprofits, providing what Levitt describes as sustainable funding that allows them to recover more food and serve more people.
The need is acute. Feeding America estimates that some 50 million Americans received charitable food assistance in 2023, and food banks have reported rising demand amid higher food prices and broader 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 said.
To address concerns about whether the climate benefits are real, Brightly says it collects three years of historical data from each food rescue organization to establish a baseline, then credits only the environmental impact that exceeds that baseline — a concept known in carbon markets as additionality. The company also analyzes the climate impact of each specific type of rescued food, from bread to meat, at what Levitt calls a «hyperspecific, line-by-line, food-item-by-food-item level.»
That attention to detail matters because voluntary carbon markets have faced sustained criticism. Research has found that some projects fail to deliver the emissions reductions they promise, and experts warn that the availability of credits can enable greenwashing, allowing companies to claim environmental progress without changing their own operations. A central critique involves additionality: if a project would have happened anyway without credit revenue, the credit does not represent a real reduction.
Brightly argues that food rescue credits avoid one of the structural problems facing forest-based offsets, which often rely on 100-year timelines to keep carbon stored — timelines that can be upended by wildfires that release sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere. Food, by contrast, is either eaten, left to rot in a landfill, or composted, giving the climate impact a much shorter and more immediate horizon.
Levitt acknowledged the broader distrust in carbon markets but said Brightly's approach creates a «virtuous loop of activity» in which credit revenue funds additional food rescue, which in turn generates further environmental benefit and more food for people facing hunger.
Whether the new credit class can overcome skepticism about offsets remains an open question. But for food rescue organizations that have long operated on thin margins, the arrival of a dedicated revenue stream tied to their environmental impact represents a potentially significant shift in how their work is financed.
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