Carbon Credits in Logistics: What's Worth Buying and What's Greenwashing
TL;DR
Most voluntary carbon credits don't deliver what they promise. Here's how to tell the difference.
Voluntary carbon credit prices range from $2 to over $200 per tonne of CO2. That spread alone should raise questions. If a tonne of carbon removal were a commodity, prices wouldn't vary by 100x. I write the sustainability methodology side of EcoFreight (see my author page); the credits question comes up on roughly half of the customer calls I sit on, and it deserves a direct answer rather than the wishy-washy one most vendors offer.
The Berkeley Carbon Trading Project has spent years analyzing credit quality across the voluntary market. A 2023 joint investigation by The Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial found that over 90% of Verra-certified rainforest (REDD+) credits examined did not represent genuine emission reductions. The projects overstated their baselines, claimed credit for forests that were never under threat, or suffered from leakage where deforestation simply shifted to neighboring areas. For our internal write-up of that investigation and what survived re-audit, see the Verra REDD quality review.
The Price Gap Tells You Something
A $2/tonne credit and a $150/tonne credit are not the same product. At the low end, you typically find avoided-deforestation credits from projects with questionable additionality: the forest would likely have been preserved regardless of the credit revenue. The project developers selected baselines showing high deforestation risk in regions where deforestation wasn't actually occurring.
At the higher end, you find engineered carbon removal: direct air capture, enhanced weathering, biochar. These cost more because they physically remove CO2 from the atmosphere and the removal is measurable and verifiable.
High prices don't guarantee high quality, but the inverse is consistent: credits trading under $5/tonne tend to come from projects with one or more of the three integrity problems described below. Ask what genuine removal can be funded at the price of a coffee.
Three Tests for Credit Quality
1. Additionality
Would this emission reduction have happened without the credit? If a renewable energy project in a country where renewables are already the cheapest option sells credits, the credit isn't funding new reductions. It's monetizing something that was going to happen anyway. This is the single biggest quality issue in the voluntary market.
2. Permanence
Forest credits can burn. Australia's 2019-2020 bushfires released an estimated 715 million tonnes of CO2. Trees planted as offsets are vulnerable to wildfire, drought, disease, and policy changes. A meaningful permanence standard requires carbon to stay sequestered for centuries, not decades.
3. Leakage
Protecting one forest can push logging to the next one. If a REDD+ project prevents deforestation in one area but the economic drivers of deforestation remain unchanged, the destruction often migrates to unprotected land nearby. The net climate benefit approaches zero.
What's Worth Buying
The highest-confidence credits share two traits: measurable additionality and durable storage. Three categories stand out:
High-Confidence Credit Types
- Direct Air Capture (DAC): Machines pull CO2 directly from ambient air and store it geologically. Climeworks, Heirloom, and Carbon Engineering are the leading operators. Stripe's Frontier consortium has been paying around $500–$1,000/tonne for early offtake, while at-scale projections target $400–600/tonne. Permanence measured in thousands of years.
- Enhanced Weathering: Spreading crushed silicate rock — typically basalt or olivine — on agricultural land accelerates natural CO2 absorption. UNDO and Lithos Carbon operate field deployments measured by soil sampling. Co-benefits include improved crop yields and reduced ocean acidification.
- Biochar: Pyrolysis converts biomass waste into stable carbon that persists in soil for hundreds of years. Well-understood chemistry, a growing verification base via Puro.earth registry, and agricultural co-benefits.
What the Science-Based Targets Initiative Says
The SBTi Net-Zero Standard draws a hard line: carbon credits cannot substitute for direct emission reductions. Companies must cut absolute emissions across their value chain by at least 90% from their baseline before using offsets.
Credits are permitted only for neutralizing residual emissions, typically 5-10% of the original baseline, that cannot be eliminated through operational changes. This means offsets are the last step, not the first. Any company claiming "carbon neutrality" through credits alone, without corresponding reductions, is not aligned with SBTi guidance.
For logistics operators, this framework matters because Scope 3 transportation emissions are increasingly scrutinized by customers and regulators. Buying credits without reducing fuel consumption, optimizing routes, or shifting modes will not satisfy science-based reporting requirements. The reduction-first sequencing is also the spine of the net-zero supply chain roadmap I sketched separately — offsets are the tail, not the lever.
A Freight-Specific Guide
For logistics companies serious about credible decarbonization, the sequence matters:
What I tell customers when they ask
The conversation goes the same way most weeks. Customer asks if they should buy credits to offset their freight footprint. I ask three questions back:
- Do you know your baseline? If not, the credit conversation is premature — you do not know what you are trying to neutralize. Start with the calculator or the REST API and lock a baseline first.
- Have you done the reductions SBTi expects before credits enter the picture? If not, credits do not get you SBTi alignment, regardless of price or quality. The 90% reduction comes first.
- What is your honest budget per tonne? If the answer is "less than $20," I tell them not to bother. The credits at that price are mostly worthless and the reputational risk of holding them is rising faster than their financial cost.
Roughly two-thirds of customers, after answering those three questions, decide to defer the credits decision and spend the budget on operational reductions instead. That is the right answer. The remaining third have a real residual they cannot reduce further, a budget that supports $200-600 per tonne removal credits, and a board that wants to see the retirement on the balance sheet. Those buyers are in the minority and the credits they buy are nothing like the $5 nature-based credits that dominate the voluntary market by volume.
Even the best credits are a bridge solution, not a destination. The goal is an economy where we don't need offsets because the emissions don't exist. Until then, high-quality credits fund the technologies and practices that get us closer.
One honest gap: carbon credit purchase is not in scope for the EcoFreight platform. We measure emissions to four-decimal-place repeatability; retiring credits against the residual is a separate workflow handled by Cloverly, Pachama, and a few others. If you need the measure-and-retire flow in one product, see the API comparison post for who does what.
Know your baseline before you offset
SBTi expects 90% absolute reduction before a credit retirement counts. Run your freight through the calculator to size the residual you'll actually need to offset. The methodology page explains how each mode is scored.