About Climate Cost
Embodied carbon is the largest hidden cost in global supply chains. It's real, it's measurable, and until now, it's been nearly impossible to look up.
Climate Cost exists to change that. We're building the open reference standard for embodied carbon in consumer goods — every product category, fully sourced, methodology transparent, free to access.
Why this exists
Every major embodied carbon tool today was built for construction. If you work in consumer goods, retail, branded merchandise, or general procurement, there has been no equivalent resource — no consistent, publicly available baseline you could point to, defend in a sustainability report, or use to compare suppliers.
Climate Cost fills that gap.
How it works
Every category on Climate Cost carries a default score expressed in kgCO₂e — the standard unit for greenhouse gas accounting. Scores are conservative by design: we assume worst-case plausible material composition, highest-emission manufacturing geographies, and no credit for recycled content or renewable energy unless verified. The burden of proof is on suppliers to demonstrate lower emissions, not on us to assume them.
The full methodology is public, versioned, and citable.
Where it came from
The index behind Climate Cost was originally developed inside Coolperx, a branded merchandise company supplying Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 organizations. The mission was straightforward: source products domestically, build them to last, and make them as circular as possible — then offset all remaining embodied carbon at the operational level, providing carbon certificates to clients as part of the service.
That work required building a generalized carbon index for consumer goods from scratch. We developed the original methodology in partnership with WAP Sustainability — at the time the leading U.S. provider of life cycle assessment (LCA) services. Climate Cost is that index, rebuilt as a public resource.
Who it's for
Climate Cost is free for anyone. The enterprise app is built for sustainability professionals, procurement teams, and corporate CSR functions that need a consistent, defensible baseline for supply chain carbon accounting.