Track your carbon footprint with Joko

At Joko, we just released a feature to monitor your carbon footprint based on bank transactions, and this forms the foundation of a company-wide effort to help our users make more informed decisions based on the environmental impact of their purchases.

How does it align with the company’s vision? How does our carbon footprint calculator work in practice? What do we envision in the long term when it comes to responsibility?

To answer these questions, let me take you through the journey that got us here and what’s coming next.

🌱 Responsibility at Joko

Joko’s vision is to help people shop smarter. Up until now, that has meant mostly focusing on purchasing power, by helping our users find the best deals through cashback, coupon codes, price tracking, and “buy now pay later”. Yet people look beyond the price when purchasing products, and actually make trade-offs depending on their constraints and sensibilities between quality, composition, delivery time, environmental impact, etc.

The summer we’ve been facing, plagued with droughts and extreme wildfires, has shown that climate change is directly affecting our lives. It has also placed environmental issues as the second highest concern for French households right after purchasing power. However, as people return from vacation back to their daily life, it’s often hard for them to keep these considerations top of mind and act on them.

As part of helping people shop smarter - beyond just getting the best prices - we also aim to provide our users with tools to make informed decisions about their purchases. Although measuring environmental impact of purchases is a vast and complex subject, today we are very proud to announce our next big step in this area: users now have the ability to leverage their bank transaction data to compute their carbon footprint and track its evolution over time.

💯 Our very first carbon footprint calculator

People already had the ability to connect their bank to Joko in order to earn cashback on their bank transactions, either when buying online or in store. Today, they can also use this functionality to track their carbon footprint.

But first, what is a carbon footprint, and why does it matter?

Nearly every purchase we make has some kind of environmental impact. Whether it’s the result of the materials in the product, how it was built, or the transportation required to bring it to you, there is a certain amount of greenhouse gas that is emitted.

Carbon footprint is measured in CO2 equivalent (“CO2e”), meaning we convert all greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, but also other gases like methane) to the equivalent amount of CO2 with the same impact on global warming. This is the main internationally-recognized indicator used today to measure your environmental impact, although it offers an incomplete picture as we’ll discuss below.

And how does this carbon footprint calculator work in practice?

We start by categorizing transactions: each of them is matched to a merchant, and we have assigned a carbon footprint category to all merchants in our database, based on what they sell most. For each of these categories, we have computed an average amount of CO2e per amount spent, by using numbers from French governmental organizations like INSEE and ADEME as well as independent European and international studies.

For example, for every euro spent on shoes (which is one of the categories we have) the average carbon output is 235 grams of CO2e. That means a €50 purchase at Chaussea, a merchant that mainly sells shoes and will be matched to this category, will result in a total carbon output of 11.8kg CO2e (0.235kg x 50€).

In the mobile app, users can access a dashboard of their CO2e totals per category, as well as the individual transactions within a category. They can also dive into the details of each category and transaction to get more granular info, and manually recategorize transactions.

This can sound very theoretical, so we encourage you to try it out with your own transactions and let us know what you think!

👷 It’s far from perfect - but it’s a start

Since we are categorizing transactions at the industry level, a limitation of our current calculator is that we are not (yet) able to adjust the carbon footprint based on whether you bought shoes from a local manufacturer or a fast-fashion brand, or whether you ordered beef or a vegetarian meal at a restaurant.

But the real asset of this model is that you are able to understand how buying shoes compares to taking the train, going to the restaurant, or buying gas. You are also able to get orders of magnitude on the footprint of each of your purchases, and what “80kg CO2e” actually means in practice. Today, it is indeed hard to link our individual actions to the 2 ton CO2e objective that has been set to respect the Paris Climate Agreement, aiming at keeping the global temperature increase below 2 degrees. This feature gets us closer to that knowledge, and what it will take to get us there.

It is impossible to create perfect calculators, as any computation of your environmental impact can only be an estimate and, by nature, biased and incomplete. The carbon dioxide emission in itself is only a partial view, as it does not include water consumption or soil pollution (among many other indicators).

That being said, we always love a good challenge 💪 so we don’t plan on stopping there and have big plans for the future!

🌳 Bringing environmental awareness into the shopping journey

This is just the beginning of our efforts when it comes to promoting responsible shopping.

In the coming weeks and months, we will start by gathering user feedback and use it to identify the most needed improvements. We have plans to make the carbon footprint computation more complete, by going beyond card transactions and including recurring fees (like gas or electricity). We’ll also be looking to better understand users’ profiles to know more about individual consumption habits, such as diets, and adjust the footprint based on this information.

In the longer term, our goal is to provide specific merchant- and product-level carbon footprint data to our users, making our calculator much more precise than it is today. We also want to enable our users to deepen their understanding of their purchases’ impact by bringing in additional considerations, such as social and ethical aspects. Responsible shopping is not only about the environment and we would like to convey information about how our purchases globally impact the world we live in.

Ultimately, all this information will be integrated seamlessly into the Joko experience, available during our users’ shopping journeys. Because we believe people should be able to easily weigh their constraints and aspirations and make informed choices based on reliable data when making purchases.

We are craving for feedback at Joko so don’t hesitate to reach out to Ron Radu and myself to share yours on the feature, or responsibility subjects in general. We’ll be very happy to hear from you!