Carbon negative

A note on our methodology and methods for carbon negative production.

At Brothers in Games we aim to offset more CO2 (carbon) than the production of our games cause. This goal belongs to the longer term goal to make our whole company operations at least carbon neutral and even negative in the future.

Since we are a startup with limited funds we explored the possibilities to offset the carbon. For that we first had to come up with at least an estimation of how much carbon is produced during the production of our games. We first asked multiple producers what the footprint of the production is but we could get no clear answers. This level of insights is still in its infancy for game/card production and we hope our questions (and hopefully from others) will drive this development of insights.

That made we needed a plan B. Plan B was to come up with a least an estimation by comparison. During our research we soon found out that 1 kg of CO2 = production of 1 book of 200 pages.* Since our first game Slava consists of around 50 cards, a cardboard inlay, short rulebook and box we made a guesstimate that this would also be in the area of 0.5-1 kg to produce. In the end we took the 1kg as the number of CO2 emission per produced game of Slava. No exact science yet but an honest guesstimate to the CO2 emission per game.

Next step was looking for parties or partners for the offset of CO2. And we came across a startup that fitted the bill and was right around the corner in the Rotterdam area where Brothers in Games is situated themselves. We are talking about Corekees. They have projects where you can invest in green bonds that also deliver an amount of CO2 compensation. E.g. bamboo production in Portugal

With the partner and estimation of CO2 production ready we set off to select some projects for our compensation. In the end we wanted to overcompensate to become CO2 negative or carbon negative for the production of Slava. Therefore we chose to compensate 1.5 kg CO2 per game of Slava. Giving it a good margin.

In terms of methodology we use the duration of the bonds x(times) the yearly CO2 offset. E.g. The bamboo project bond runs for 15 years and has a yearly offset of 46 kg CO2 per year. When buying this bond it gave us 690 KG of CO2 compensation. We only apply this formula once when buying the bonds to compensate. Planting a tree, bamboo fields or similar does not give endless benefits so we used the bonds duration as the limit.

We hope this sheds some more light on our way of offsetting the CO2 emission during production. And for us it’s a win-win since the bonds also give some return.

In the future we will look into adding more types of C02 compensation methods to our mix. E.g. Direct Air Capture (DAC) technologies.

If there are any more questions or perhaps tips about CO2 compensation please sent an email to info@brothersingames.com.

*https://corekees.com/news/hoeveel-is-een-kilo-co2/