When you purchase carbon credits from Carbon Credit Cart, you receive a certificate to confirm the purchase. This is typically emailed to you within one business day of your purchase:
This certificate is essential as it verifies the following three things:
- That the credits are legitimate by virtue of being registered with a recognized carbon registry
- That each carbon credit you’ve purchased can be traced to a specific serial number within that registry
- That the carbon credits purchased are being retired, i.e. that your purchase of the carbon credit is confirmed as providing benefit to the project (rather than being held as a commodity for any kind of later resale)
This carbon credit certificate contains a lot of other information as well. Let’s take a look at the details:
- Number of credits purchased
- Confirmation that each credit is equivalent to offsetting 1 metric tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2e) in the atmosphere
- Confirmation that the credits purchased are being retired (see point #3 above for why this is important)
- Project for which the carbon credits have been purchased
- Registry where this project (and its associated verification information) is recorded
- The specific project ID of that project in the registry
- Who the purchase / certificate is on behalf of; this is typically the name of the person who purchased the credits on Carbon Credit Cart, but can instead be anything the purchaser specifies, such as on behalf of a company / organization, another individual or even an occasion
- Date of the purchase
- The vendor; this is the organization that connects projects with purchasers, sometimes directly, sometimes via a platform such as Carbon Credit Cart
- The platform on which the credits were purchased. Hey, that’s us!
- Serial numbers purchased. This is the serial number start and end range for the purchase, verifying that you are the sole and legitimate owner of these specific credits. Note that the “incrementing field” in the serial number range is often in the middle of the string, not the end. In the example above, it’s the second set of numbers, incrementing from 414665824 to 414665833.
Though this information set is standard, this certificate design is unique to the Carbon Credit Cart platform. We were intentional in creating a certificate that’s “designed to display” in the hope that each purchaser (or “on behalf of” recipient) will show, share, and inspire others to buy their own carbon credits as we work together to build a bridge to a carbon-free future.