Evaluating sustainable products. #1: Treecard
Applied lessons in green product design
Estimated reading time: 13 minutes. Your email client will probably cut the article off half-way, but you can read the whole thing on the sustainableUX substack site.
Evaluating new green apps & services
Climate change is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity, which is an exceedingly glass-half-full way of looking at the crisis. No wonder VC’s have pumped fortunes into the cleantech sector - $111 billion in 2021 alone. The result is a deluge of new climate-related apps and services.
Predictably, opportunists are trying to cash in.
“…53.3% of examined environmental claims in the EU were found to be vague, misleading or unfounded and 40% were unsubstantiated”.
Of the remaining 46.3%, an even smaller percentage are going to be genuinely impactful. And with sketchy climate schemes in the news, consumers are rightly skeptical. So, how are designers supposed to prove the environmental bone fides of their products?
I’ve drafted a sustainable product evaluation checklist to help product designers find the strengths and flaws in digital sustainability offerings. Each step of the evaluation below points to (hopefully) valuable lessons (💡) for founders and designers.
Evaluation test case: Treecard, a debit card that plants trees
I picked Treecard because I’ve been a customer for a while but hadn’t done a lot of due diligence. To be honest, they had me at “wooden card” - I didn’t look deeper than that.
Treecard is a debit card that plants trees as you spend. They make their money from interchange fees, same as other credit & debit cards. With 450,000 reported sign-ups and a partnership with Ecosia, Treecard has the potential to make a major positive impact.
On the user experience side, Treecard has an attractive, usable app with some cute features.
The sustainability side is harder to assess. There’s little transparency around the business model. The big unanswered question: how much of Treecard’s income goes to tree-planting? As a customer I hope the answer is “as much as possible, with some left over to grow the business and pay back investors”, but that isn’t a given.
Examining the core value proposition suggests that you could perhaps plant more trees by using cashback from an ordinary debit card - although that is based on pure guess-work, as Treecard don’t share their costs and assumptions.
Red flags include their choice of banking partner and funding: one of the major investors was founded by someone who doesn’t seem like a climate champion (bonus: supports Trump).
Caveat
This article is my subjective opinion and is presented in good faith. All facts and figures taken from public websites, and all conclusions are my own.
Evaluation checklist
I looked at Treecard through the following lenses:
User experience factors.
Lifecycle: the scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions related to this service.
Value proposition: what does this thing do, does it do it well, and is it a problem worth solving.
Business: “follow the money”. Who is behind the product/service, how much value do they intend to extract as profit, and what are their own values?
Culture and values: how are employees treated? What ethical considerations does the company recognize?
1. Experience evaluation
The app
Treecard’s android app is usable and engaging. My favorite feature is the tree grove - an interactive representation of the trees you’ve planted. It’s nice to have a tactile memento of your trees making the whole idea more tangible. There’s also a sponsored step-counter feature that encourages frequent check-ins.
💡Lesson: Rendering impact in a tangible and interactive way can enhance engagement.
Issues with impact reporting
Treecard’s personal impact reports are full of good feels. My own report states I’ve planted 27 trees and captured 27 tons of CO2 (“carbon absorbed” - note the past tense). How have my brand-new saplings captured so much CO2 already? Some trees might capture 1 ton after 100 years. A freshly planted tree has captured a tiny fraction of that.
At minimum there should be call-outs that qualify their claims. “Carbon absorbed” should be “carbon absorption potential”. Presumably the other figures are also based on adult trees rather than saplings.
💡Lesson: Don’t claim future impact as fact.
Carbon-per-tree varies by species, but is typically less than a ton. Mangrove trees, for instance, capture 0.3 tons in their lifetime. Saying 1 tree = 1 ton is lazy and inaccurate, if the average is more like 0.7 tons (for example).
💡Lessons: Show your work: don’t round up, share your assumptions, and show how you arrived at your stats.
How much CO2 does a tree absorb? (Onetree)
CO2 varies by species (Uni of Exeter)
Inconsistent messaging
Treecard has planted 300,000 trees. Or 2 million. Or wait, is it 3 million? There are conflicting numbers across their site, app, and social media. It gives the impression that Treecard are careless with the facts.
💡Lesson: Keep content in sync across channels: people can and will spot inconsistencies, and that will undermine trust.
I took this screenshot a month after the previous one (above, Impact section). It shows a huge leap from 2.1 million to 2.9 million trees planted. Either Treecard is scaling at a fast pace, or they have changed the metric for calculating how many trees are planted.
💡Lesson: Tell a convincing story; don’t give the impression that you might be inflating your impact.
2: Scope 1/2/3
The card
The Treecard itself is very nice – hewn from sustainable cherry wood, it’s light and attractive (scope 1). But the delivery (scope 2) was odd: it came by DHL, a service never seen in my area, making me think it had made a special trip at a high carbon cost.
💡Lesson: Consistently apply sustainability thinking across all touchpoints.
End-of-life
If there are instructions on how to recycle the card responsibly, I haven’t found them yet. It isn’t pure wood - there are some bits of plastic and silicone in there too.
Scope 1 and 2
Aside from the issues with fulfilment, it wasn’t possible to identify any other Scope 1 (direct) or Scope 2 (indirect) emissions factors. I couldn’t find any information on how Treecard’s office operates, or if they offset their operations.
Scope 3
See notes below about Treecard’s banking partner, Sutton Bank.
3. The value proposition
Evaluating Treecard’s value prop required some sleuthing and a lot of guesswork. There is plenty of room for different interpretations.
“Our top priority will always be helping you plant as many trees as possible.”
- Treecard blog June 2023
Treecard promise 1 tree planted for every $50 you spend (and you get 50 reward points, too). To work out if this represents good value, I’ve tried to compare against a standard debit or credit card earning 2% cashback.
What do trees cost?
“It depends”. For trees planted by organisations linked to Ecosia, the answer seems to be between $1 and $0.15.
Crucially, Treecard aren’t saying how much they pay per tree.
Comparing Treecard to a 2% cashback card
If a tree costs $1:
Treecard and the debit card give the same value. $50 = 1 tree worth $1, or earns you $1 with the debit card (disregarding points).
If trees are 20 cents:
Then the 2% debit card is 5x better value than Treecard.
The point scheme suggests Treecard pays closer to 20 cents.
As well as earning a tree, spending $50 also nets you 50 reward points. These can be redeemed for a variety of rewards, such as green products or eco-adventures. Working out the cash value of the rewards could give us a clue as to how points are valued.
The result? Point-to-cash values vary per reward but it averages about half a cent or $0.004 per point.
Treecard offers extra trees as a reward, for 50 points. This suggests Treecard pays $0.20 per tree (50pts x 0.4c = 20 cents). More details in the appendix.
Note: just as I was about to publish this article, Treecard revalued all their points-based rewards and seem to give a higher price to trees. The figures quoted here apply to the time before the adjustment - before June 10th 2023.
A standard debit card appears to be better value
If the above math is accurate, then someone using a standard 2% debit card is getting 2.5x more reward value compared to the Treecard user: $1 vs. $0.40 ($0.20 for the tree, $0.20 in reward point value).
Possible counter-arguments
Playing devil’s advocate:
Treecard might be paying more than $0.20 a tree, and are simply keeping the cost of trees low (in points) to encourage more planting.
Many debit cards offer 2% cashback, but that doesn’t mean that Treecard is making as much in interchange fees compared to the major banks. So the 2% card comparison may be unfair.
If they weren’t using Treecard, someone might be planting zero trees and spending their $1.00 cashback on burgers and gasoline.
Lesson: Transparency is key 👑🪟
This highlights the importance of transparency in how your business makes impact. Absent other information, my best guess is that only 20% of Treecard’s revenue goes to planting trees, leaving the rest for their operations and profits. If Treecard were transparent about their costs, I wouldn’t have to guess.
💡Lesson: Consider being clear about how revenue is shared between impact, operations, and profit. Lack of information can cause users to imagine an inequitable split.
4. Evaluating the business
Are Treecard the sort of company that an eco-minded consumer would want to do business with? There’s some info in the FAQs:
Are they non-profit / not-for-profit?
Treecard describes itself as an “impact-first business”.
“Treecard's business model is a hybrid between a non-profit and full-profit business. Our goal is to scale our project and make it as high-performing and profitable as possible. But instead of using these profits to pay our CEO a huge salary, or pay out dividends to shareholders, we use them to fund reforestation projects. 🌳” - Treecard support site
Sounds great - but “Impact-first” is a marketing term, not a certified scheme (like a B-Corp).
Some impact-first businesses make a point of saying they will never sell, as a way of showing they are truly committed rather than looking for the next big exit. Treecard don’t mention this.
Banking services by Sutton, an agri-bank
Mastercard services and user deposits are handled by Sutton, who are primarily involved with the agricultural sector. Sitton also previously provided banking services for Cash App and Robinhood.
Sutton make no statements about climate change on their website, and don’t seem to have any corporate social responsibility materials online.
One Treecard founder had this to say about their arrangement with Sutton:
“The commitment there is that your funds aren’t used for fossil fuel investments,”
But there is no commitment that Sutton bank won’t use the profits from the Treecard deal to invest in fossil fuels outside of the Treecard agreement.
💡Lesson: Where possible, ensure that your company works with vendors & service partners that have a verifiable commitment to sustainability.
Funding and investors 🚩
The FAQs don’t mention ownership, but here’s what I could glean from Crunchbase and other sources: to date they’ve raised $23m in Series A funding, on top of $6m seed capital (some from Ecosia). Who else invested?
“Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures was the largest investor in TreeCard’s round, while EQT, Seedcamp and climate-centric venture capital firm World Fund also chipped in. Valar is a prolific investor in fintech, having previously taken stakes in the likes of Wise and N26.”
Oh boy. My interpretation is that if Treecard is successful, then their investors will profit. And some of those profits may be channeled into certain political projects that are probably the opposite of what most Treecard customers want.
💡Lesson: If your board, advisors, and investors generally align with your stated values (which they should), then make that information available. (See examples below: FutureCard and Aspiration).
5. Culture and values
Is Treecard an ethical employer?
They aren’t a B-corp or an S-corp or other entity that would be required to follow a certain standard of employee welfare.
Glassdoor reports are mostly favorable.
Do they apply sustainability thinking to their own operations?
They are not part of any offsetting initiative like 1% for the planet.
There is no mention of them running their office operations at net zero.
No info on whether the founders have a personal interest or stake in sustainability.
Staff get to go on a tree-planting retreats.
Lessons learned => Product Principles
Putting Treecard under the microscope revealed many potential issues - in content & general messaging, transparency, the business model, and more. Condensing down the lessons into design principles:
Trust & transparency
Trust is fragile. One small inconsistency or exaggeration can be enough to turn a user skeptical.
Be transparent. The more you pull back the curtain, the greater the user’s trust.
Show your work. Share accurate figures and underlying assumptions. Chances are that some users might know as much (or more) than you about, say, plastics recycling or tree planting. Lazy round-ups or claiming future benefits as fact will bite you on the bum.
Keep content consistent. Across all channels, at all times. Failure to do so can weaken trust.
Demonstrate your values
Operational integrity / walk the walk. If you are all about the environment, then make sure your operational profile matches your intent. This could mean committing to an ethical business practices standard, like B-Corp.
Respect for linked issues. Odds are someone who wants to plant trees cares about climate change and other intersectional issues around equality, inclusivity and justice. Make sure your offering and content reflect this.
Balance growth hacking and the environment. If you have a reward system, it shouldn’t perpetuate a pattern of excess consumption in the interest of more app adoption.
These aren’t one-size-fits-all, I wrote them in response to what I perceive as weaknesses in this particular product.
For an example of a company that does transparency well, check out the MightyBytes 2023 impact report.
Final thoughts
I set out thinking this article would be more about the UX side, but found that I couldn’t evaluate the product without a basic understanding of the financial underpinnings.
Because Treecard choose not to be transparent there is plenty of room for different interpretations of the facts. But there were too many red flags for me: I cancelled my account just before publishing this article.
Consumers should expect and demand transparency from services especially when they are trusting that their money is going only good causes. There may soon be a legal requirement, too: “FTC Seeks Public Comment on Potential Updates to its ‘Green Guides’ for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims” - and in the EU, “Consumer protection: enabling sustainable choices and ending greenwashing” (thanks Tim Frick for these links).
Other debit card options
I haven’t scrutinized these, but they look promising:
US based
Aspiration offer up to 10% cashback (on stores in their coalition). Roundups plant trees. This is currently my top contender for a replacement card.
B-corp certified
1% for the planet
FutureCard has a similar idea, but isn’t a b-corp.
“Enjoy 6% cashback at our FuturePartners and 5% cashback on public transport, electric charging, bikes & scooters, renewed clothes, electronics & furniture and plant-based meat, dairy and eggs.”
Investors in FutureCard include Baratunde Thurston and Climate Capital.
Elsewhere
UK ethical banks (how British - there’s a “Good Egg” certification).
Thanks for reading! This is the longest thing I’ve written in a long time - hopefully you found it interesting.
Thanks to Tim Frick and Jen Briselli for giving constructive feedback on an earlier draft.
Your product here
Want me to review your product? Get in touch: SustainableUX@gmail.com.
APPENDICIES
Value of Treecard points
Points value estimate conducted early June 2023.
Speedboat experience 40,000
Real value $240 https://www.airbnb.com/experiences/75117
$1 = 166pt; 1pt = 0.6c
Allbirds shoes 25,000pts ($100 voucher)
$1 = 250pts; 1pt = 0.4c
National Parks pass 15,000 pts ($80 retail)
$1 = 187pts; 1pt = 0.5c
The value of points, ranked
Speedboat trip 0.6c
Parks pass: 0.5c
$0.15c tree:: 0.4c
Allbirds shoes: 0.4c
Various other rewards came in at less than 0.4c.
If Treecard value a point at 0.4c on average, then 50pts = 20 cents = 1 tree.
Points update, trees now cost $0.50?
Treecard have recently revalued their rewards.
Planting a tree now requires 100pts instead of 50pts;
National parks pass is still 15,000, leaving point-value at $0.005;
Speedboat tour is also unchanged; 40,000pts = $240 (estimated). 1pt = $0.006;
A $40 Airbnb voucher for a kayak tour: 8,000pts. 1pt = $0.005;
Several other rewards removed.
I previously estimated the value of a point as $0.004 - the rewards update suggests it’s closer to $0.005.
It now takes twice as many points to plant a tree, which suggests Treecard value a tree at $0.5 (100pts x $0.005).
Does that change the potential value of Treecard vs. a regular debit card? Here’s my guesswork:
Spending $50 plants a tree and earns 50pts.
Treecard values a tree at $0.50, and 50pts is worth $0.25.
If true, then Treecard now gives $0.75 of value compared to $1.00 from a 2% debit card. Which is a big improvement.
I’m left wondering whether trees doubled in price, or something else changed in Treecard’s math.
What do trees cost?
$7.6 to plant in Scotland (Treesforlife)
$1.00 Ecosia’s web shop
$1.00 OneTreePlanted (background)
$0.15, says Eden Projects (a major planting partner of Ecosias)
Eden Projects: how much does it cost to plant a tree
The general tree planting price is $0.15 per tree, provided that your donation is not designated to a specific project nation. Should you choose to designate your donation to a particular country, the price varies according to each nation’s planting and labor costs.
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