Tableland is on a quest to support builders in exploring and experimenting with new ways to bring the dynamism of art, music, culture and ultimately humanity, to a new vision of the web. As the broader web3 ecosystem progresses toward designing this new internet, we believe environmental sustainability and regeneration must be at its core. In exploring how to bring this to life within our own work, we’ve partnered with Toucan Protocol, an organization that is sitting at the forefront of regenerative technology.

Toucan offers infrastructure that brings programmable carbon to web3, making it easier for web3 organizations to practise environmental responsibility. They’ve been integral to supporting Tableland’s journey to offsetting the carbon footprint of our Rigs NFT launch, educating us on the intricacies of measuring carbon outputs, the nuances of aspiring to carbon neutrality, and sharing tools and processes to help automate our efforts going forward.

With their help, we’ve taken steps to offset the carbon produced by our Rigs NFT launch. This involved purchasing Nature Carbon Tonnes (NCT) and retiring an amount equivalent to the estimated carbon generated from the Rigs NFT launch to ensure the credits are permanently removed from circulation and never double counted. The process consisted of 4 main steps:

1. Estimate carbon emissions for our Rigs NFT launch

2. Purchase Nature Carbon Tonnes for retirement

3. Measure our carbon emissions following the Rigs NFT launch

4. Retire NCTs equivalent to these estimated carbon emissions

The most challenging part of the process is estimating the carbon footprint, especially for an early stage project with little historical data to work from. Luckily, there are several tools available that help estimate the carbon emissions from contract addresses as a starting point. We used carbon.fyi to look at carbon emissions from NFT projects of various sizes, and used this as a starting point. Our research indicated that we could expect anywhere from 50-300 tonnes of carbon for an NFT launch, depending largely on secondary sales. We went ahead and purchased 430 tonnes to ensure full coverage of our launch, plus more to keep on reserve as we continue toward our commitment to environmental responsibility in the Tableland network. Approximately 2 weeks post launch, we were able to estimate our carbon footprint for Rigs NFT to be 103 tonnes of CO2 emissions, and to account for potential discrepancies in measurement, we proceeded to retire 125 NCT to offset the launch.

“Tableland is setting an example for how to integrate climate action into a platform from day 1. This is the path forward to establish a truly regenerative economy within web3.” Sander DiAngelis, growth at Toucan.

Tableland is a place for creators and builders of the new web to come together and innovate; and we steadfastly believe that environmental responsibility must be kept top of mind as we build. We’ve made an important first step, and now we’re committed to continually improving our process for measuring and offsetting our carbon emissions. As we move forward with designing the Tableland protocol and network, our goal is to create an ecosystem that participates in carbon responsibility by default. We look forward to working closely with our community and thought leaders like Toucan to design automated and simplified processes that move us closer to carbon neutrality.

To learn more about Toucan, go visit toucan.earth, join their Discord here and follow them on Twitter.

To learn more, go visit tableland.xyz and check out the Tableland Rigs blog post. You can also join our Discord and follow us on Twitter.