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How Meta’s latest forest credits purchase gets it closer to net zero

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01 Apr, 2025

This post was originally published on Green Biz

Source: Green Biz

The tech giant Meta, owner of Facebook and WhatsApp, has purchased 676,000 carbon credits as part of a project that will transform the management of 68,000 acres of previously commercial forest on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. The deal is the first time EFM, the forest investment company that acquired the land, has used credit sales to help fund a forest purchase. 

It also represents a significant uptick in credit use by Meta, which will receive the credits over a 10-year period. The company has retired an average 65,000 credits annually since 2021, according to Allied Offsets, a provider of carbon market data. Combined with a purchase last September of up to 2.9 million forest credits through 2038 from the forestry arm of Brazilian investment bank BTG Pactual, the company has contracts in place to allow it to retire more than 200,000 credits every year for the next decade from those two projects alone.

In addition to offsetting emissions as part of its strategy to reach net zero by 2030, Meta said it chose the project because of the broader benefits it will bring to carbon markets. “EFM’s landscape-scale conservation efforts will not only sequester carbon to help us achieve our net zero target,” said Tracy Johns, carbon removal program lead at Meta. “It will also provide lasting outcomes for the ecosystem, local economy, and Hoh, Quileute, and other communities who rely on this healthy and responsibly managed forestland.” The company declined to disclose the cost of its purchase.

No more clear-cutting

EFM’s newly acquired forest is a coastal strip of land that was owned by the forest products company Rayonier for around 80 years. In keeping with conventional management of commercial forests, the company clear-cut the land every 35 years or so and replanted with Douglas fir, western hemlock and Sitka spruce. “It would look more like a plantation,” said Bettina von Hagen, EFM’s CEO.

Thanks to the purchase, which cost EFM more than $200 million, the land will now be managed with more holistic goals, including enhancing biodiversity and storing additional carbon. That means adding western red cedar, a culturally and ecologically significant species that grows slowly and is often excluded from commercial forests; bigleaf maple, which provides food for invertebrates and thus, indirectly, salmon; and multiple understory species.

Harvesting will continue, however. Von Hagen said EFM will apply two methods that balance extraction with long-term sustainability. In a thinning operation, loggers cut around 30 percent of trees and leave what remains. Variable retention harvesting involves removing a much larger fraction — between 70 and 90 percent — while leaving enough trees to protect the soil and provide habitat for animals. The practices will allow the forest to continue to support the local timber industry even as the carbon stored on the land is increased. EFM estimates that 10 million tons of carbon dioxide is currently stored on the land and that the new management practices will increase that by 1 million tons. 

Investors want predictability

The deal that secured the forest was put together at extremely short notice: Von Hagen said data on the forest was made available just nine weeks before binding bids were due. “Until now, we have not been able to assemble the capital for large acquisitions in the short time frames that are usually provided, and have not been able to compete with buyers which were only underwriting the timber, which is a known commodity with predictable prices with which institutional investors are very familiar,” she explained. “Having a contract with a great counterparty like Meta allowed our investors to underwrite the transaction with a predictable set of carbon and timber prices, and that made all the difference.”

Schemes projects that combine commercial activities with carbon storage — which fall into a category of projects known as improved forest management (IFM) — have previously come in for criticism. To estimate the carbon stored by a project, developers forecast the harvesting that would have taken place in the absence of IFM practices. Researchers have warned that the methodologies governing IFM projects allow developers to overestimate baseline harvesting and generate unearned credits. The methodology that will be used by EFM was developed by ACR, a carbon credits standard-setter formerly known as the American Carbon Registry, and was updated in September of last year, in part to improve the precision of baseline measurements.

The post How Meta’s latest forest credits purchase gets it closer to net zero appeared first on Trellis.

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ABB receives EPD status for gearless mill drive ring motor

ABB receives EPD status for gearless mill drive ring motor

ABB has gained Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) status for its Gearless Mill Drive (GMD) ring motor — technology used to drive large grinding mills in the mining industry.

An EPD is a standardised document that provides detailed information about the environmental impact of a product throughout its life cycle. Based on a comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) study, the EPD highlights ABB’s commitment to transparency, environmental responsibility and supporting customers in making informed decisions on sustainability in their supply chains.

ABB analysed the environmental impact of a ring motor across its entire life cycle from supply chain and production to usage and end-of-life disposal. The study was conducted for a ring motor of a semi-autogenous grinding (SAG) mill with an installed power of 24 MW and was based on a reference service life of 25 years.

“Sustainability is at the core of our purpose at ABB, influencing how we operate and innovate for customers,” said Andrea Quinta, Sustainability Specialist at ABB. “By earning the Environmental Product Declaration for our ring motor, we emphasise our environmental stewardship and industry leadership for this technology. We adhered to the highest standards throughout this process, as we do in the ABB Ring Motor factory every day. This recognition highlights to the mining industry what they are bringing into their own operations when they work with ABB.”

The comprehensive LCA was conducted at ABB’s factory in Bilbao, Spain, and was externally verified and published in accordance with international standards ISO 14025 and ISO 14040/14044. It will remain valid for five years.

The ring motor, a key component of the GMD, is a drive system without any gears where the transmission of the torque between the motor and the mill is done through the magnetic field in the air gap between the motor stator and the motor rotor. It optimises grinding applications in the minerals and mining industries by enabling variable-speed operation, leading to energy and cost savings.

The full EPD for the ABB GMD Ring Motor can be viewed on EPD International.

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