For environmentally-focused organizations, it's best practice to lay out your mission and commitments in a formal sustainability policy and to track how you are living up to those standards in your regular reporting cycle.
As these documents can be hard to find, we want to help you share them with your target audience. By linking directly to your environmental policies and reports from your .eco profile, it boosts transparency and makes it easier for visitors to navigate directly to them.
In the Policies & Reports section on your .eco profile, you can add the title and link for these documents. You can either enter these details directly or you can load it from a carbon.txt file on your website.
What is carbon.txt?
Carbon.txt is a standard file format developed by the Green Web Foundation that enables you point to your key environmental claims from a known location on your website. Environmental reports and policies can be hard to find on a website, so pointing to them from a known location makes them discoverable and auditable.
You might have heard of robots.txt – this is a commonly used file which is designed to instruct well-behaved robots about which parts of your site to crawl and which to ignore. Carbon.txt is the same idea – a simple file with machine-readable information which tells other systems where to find your sustainability information
The carbon.txt file is intended to be accessible from the root folder of your website (eg. https://<your domain>/carbon.txt or in the /.well-known/ folder. The carbon.txt website has a file builder that you can use to build the file for your website.
Once you've generated the file and uploaded it to your website, you can then import the contents of this file to show on your .eco profile. If you would like to see an example of a carbon.txt file, you are welcome to check out ours.
Why use carbon.txt?
The main advantage of using carbon.txt is that it is a standard location for storing this information. The file can then be used by other tools without needing to manually maintain this data in multiple places. For documents that change regularly, such as annual reports, it can be easier to update your carbon.txt file and then have that data loaded into other tools that use it.