I love catching up with my carbon friends and colleagues. What we do at Bloom is still new to most of them, and I get to explain how commodity EACs work, and why the future of the carbon markets lies in supply chain decarbonisation – which is where we live.
Why does Bloom’s circular economy commodity EAC solution look so new?
Growing up in the carbon markets, cutting my teeth designing carbon reduction projects that met the requirements of the CDM Executive Board, I relied on terms like project, intervention, additionality.
Even today, the likes of the AIM Platform and VERRA’s expansion into supply chain activities still assume the same underlying logic: capital investment into a project that leads to a reduction or avoidance of carbon emissions.
Capital
Intervention
Reduction
Within the circular economy, the dynamic is quite different. It is less about capital investment and more about procurement decisions and product design briefs.
When a company decides to divert waste from landfill and send it for processing into a secondary commodity, the old market logic would frame the resulting benefit as an avoided emission > less need for virgin material extraction. But that framing misses what’s actually happening. There is no project with a physical boundary here. The intervention is a strategic business decision, taken at the leadership level, about how materials or legacy assets are processed downstream.
The same is true when a company chooses a low-carbon material derived from a recycling process over virgin input. That isn’t a project either. It’s a design decision to bring a lower-carbon product to market.
We think of project boundaries as sitting at the processing facility level: where the IT assets, plastic bottles, or rubber tyres are processed for second life or recovered as raw material.
Physical input
Processing facility
Second-life asset / recycled commodity
✨ Circularity is the intervention.
Bloom’s unique position in this new world is that our software tracks the underlying physical assets as they arrive at recyclers’ facilities, in real time. Through the Bloom registry, that tracking data becomes the basis for issuing tradable commodity EACs, instruments tied to the intensity of the processed asset itself, not to a modelled avoidance. It’s a different unit of account for a different kind of intervention.
📅 I look forward to more of these conversations as we head into NY Climate Week!
Sebastian Foot
Co-founder of Bloom Sustainability Advisors.20+ years sustainable finance experience.
