Carbon.txt - Overview

Carbon.txt is a single place to look on any domain – /carbon.txt – for public, machine-readable, sustainability data relating to that company.

It’s a web-first, connect not collect style approach, of most benefit to those interested in scraping the structured data companies have to publish according to national laws. Designed to be extended by default, we see carbon.txt becoming essential infrastructure for sustainability data services crunching available numbers and sharing the stories it can tell.

Why carbon.txt?

1. Discovery of sustainability data continues to be a problem. Our research with Wikirate made it abundantly clear that without new, webby approaches, sustainability data will continue to be hard to find or out of date.
2. Changes in the law mean that lots of firms will need to publish all kinds of sustainability data that previously they didn’t have to. The law literally says they need to publish this data online, free of charge for the public to see, and there are significant GDPR-scale fees for non-compliance.
3. New standards mean that this data will be comparable, machine-readable, and likely across different parts of the world. This could make verifying claims and identifying greenwashing easier, if it’s done right.
4. Carbon.txt is our open-source project to make this sustainability information easier to discover. Carbon.txt is a spec that defines predictable, consistent places on any website to publish sustainability data so that both humans and machines can find it.

These docs

The documentation on this website is aimed at developers looking to build additional tooling that extends carbon.txt - primarily through plugins and other extensions to the carbon.txt validator.

Other Carbon.txt Tools

Below are a collection of tools that you can use to get started creating a carbon.txt file for your organisation, or to check the contents of an existing carbon.txt file.

• File builder

  Create a carbon.txt file for your organisation

  Use the builder

• Validator

  Check the syntax of a carbon.txt file and view its content.

  Use the validator

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Licenses

The code for Grid-aware Websites core library and plugins are licensed Apache 2.0. (What does this mean?)