How we Evaluate and Rate Brands

Brands are independently evaluated and rated by our carbon experts. When you buy through our links, we may earn a commission. We evaluate each brand independently. Affiliate partnerships in no way influence our brand ratings or reviews.

When you purchase offsets for flights, gifts, or through Commons’ Climate Stewardship subscription, Commons charges a 20% transaction fee to cover the costs of our time-intensive evaluation and monitoring processes. This is standard for offset providers.

We’re a small team of carbon experts, data scientists, engineers, writers, and designers passionate about making sustainable living more accessible. Our Founder & CEO, Sanchali Pal, started tracking her carbon footprint in an Excel spreadsheet over 10 years ago because she couldn’t find any good tools to align her life with the world she wanted to live in. You can read more about us here.

Commons has raised $13.5 million in funding. Our investors include Sequoia Capital, climate investors Amasia and Norrsken, and the founders of Headspace, Fitbit, Candy Crush, and Nest. Commons has also received funding from public figures like Maisie Williams and Jay-Z’s Arrive. The company’s starting capital came from grants from Harvard and MIT.

Our small team manually evaluates brands, focusing first on the biggest, most popular brands, well-known sustainable options, and some smaller sustainable brands. We have hundreds more brands on our list.

If you see an unrated brand, you can click the 'Request' button to help bump this brand to the top of our to-do list.

Auto-generated ratings are based on the same criteria as our Expert Ratings, but with less in-depth analysis.

All of our brand ratings (expert and auto) are based on publicly available information and graded based on our category-specific rubrics. Expert ratings include human analysis and verification at the scoring stage, whereas auto-generated ratings rely on AI analysis of brand claims.

If you read an auto-rating and would like a more in-depth Expert rating, you can request one on the brand’s page.

When a brand doesn't provide substantial public sustainability information, our team gives it a partial rating. You may see partial ratings on child brands of large corporations if there is no brand-specific reporting available, or any other brands with insufficient sustainability reporting.

A company’s size indicates how much resourcing and influence it has. Large brands have access to more money and resources to improve sustainability efforts, which is why we hold them to a higher standard by making scoring more rigorous. Here’s how we determine company size:

• Small companies: Less than 500 employees and/or under $150m annual revenue
• Large companies: More than 500 employees and/or over $150m annual revenue and/or publicly listed

AI (artificial intelligence) has opened up vast possibilities for creating and computing, but it comes with a hefty environmental toll and can include inaccuracies, so we don’t use it lightly. We are actively taking steps to track and account for our company-wide AI usage using best-in-class data and research. We’ll report on our AI emissions in our upcoming annual impact report.

In addition to small-scale usage on a team-by-team basis, we use AI to filter through vast amounts of publicly available brand information and surface relevant resources as part of our research and analysis for brand ratings.