Neutral is shutting down

After three years and 4,613 trees planted, Neutral is shutting down.

In late 2019, bushfires spread across the east coast of Australia. By the time the season ended in March 2020, they’d burned about 24 million hectares and killed 33 people, and the smoke killed around 445 more.

It wasn’t a one-off. CSIRO research links it to fire weather that’s been getting worse for decades, in line with what climate change predicts.

Sydney sat under smoke and a red sky for days at a time. We called it Black Summer.

I’d always tried to make sustainable choices, but it was clear that wasn’t nearly enough. So I started with my own footprint: walking instead of taking Ubers, using less electricity at home and flying less (the pandemic helped with that one).

It’s close to impossible to live a carbon-neutral life, though, so I started looking at reforestation, the main way to sequester the emissions you can’t avoid. The options weren’t great. Most organizations only took one-off donations, most carbon calculators were inaccurate or hard to use, and the few apps in the space didn’t support programs outside of Africa. I wanted to know my emissions and plant enough trees every month to cover them, ideally in Australia.

So I built Neutral. You fill in a short questionnaire about your lifestyle, and it combines your answers with U.S. EPA and other data to estimate your CO₂e emissions. Then you subscribe to a monthly reforestation plan in the country of your choice, sized to offset them. The trees were planted by organizations like One Tree Planted, WeForest and TIST, and by early 2021 there were 27 programs across 17 countries to choose from.

Over three years it grew to include a carbon score you could compare with friends, a news feed, a community for questions and clean energy projects you could support alongside the trees.

Neutral was always a side project. I built it in my spare time, and almost everything subscribers paid went straight to the planting programs, which is how I wanted it. After three years, I think those subscribers are better off with organizations that do this full-time.

I’ve ended all active subscriptions, so nobody will be charged again. If you’d like to keep offsetting, I’d recommend Wren. It works much like Neutral, calculating your footprint and offsetting it through a monthly subscription, and they’ve kindly set up a page for Neutral users with a free first month. Or you can give directly to the organizations that planted Neutral’s trees.