In this post, we look at how .eco domains have used carbon.txt to streamline the process of adding disclosures to organisational profiles.
.eco domains are a top-level domain (TLD) designed to help sustainability-driven organisations and individuals to build online homes that showcase their values. The initiative, started in 2008, centres domain registration around the key principles of community, trust, transparency, and sustainability.
Transparency builds trust
Anyone can purchase a .eco domain and set it up to serve their website. What sets .eco domains apart, though, is that unlike most regular domains there are a few extra steps domain owners must take before their website will be accessible on the public internet. .eco domains are locked until domain owners create a profile on the .eco platform. That profile includes information shared by the domain owner about how their organisation or work aligns with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, any certifications and memberships they might hold, as well as listing their ongoing environmental actions, policies, and reports. You can look up .eco profiles for any .eco domain at https://profiles.eco/.
Integrating carbon.txt to streamline disclosure reporting
Part of creating a .eco profile involves domain owners uploading sustainability-related policies and disclosures to the platform. For those following along with our work at the Green Web Foundation, this idea of linking to sustainability disclosures may sound familiar – it’s the same “connect not collect” philosophy we’ve been exploring through the carbon.txt project.
Members of the .eco team have been active participants in the ClimateAction.Tech community for some time. Through that community, they’ve connect with a few of us here at the Green Web Foundation too. We know the team have been following along with our work for some time and were very early, enthusiastic advocates for the capabilities of the carbon.txt project since the original pilot project kicked off in 2022. As the project has evolved, they’ve been a regular contributor to project discussions on GitHub.
At the heart of the carbon.txt project is the notion that sustainability information should be discoverable at a single, reliable location on any organisation’s domain in a format that is readable for both humans and machines. This consistency of location, coupled with a machine-readable structured data format, make carbon.txt an ideal partner for projects that need to discover, link to, and parse organisational sustainability disclosures.
Carbon.txt provides a more maintainable approach for collecting this information, for something like annual reports where information is going to be time bound. Rather than leaving it to the companies to log in and update, they can manage it on their site, and in the future we can refresh the information periodically.
~ Owen Rogers, Big Room Inc., the .eco Registry
The .eco team were quick to realise the usefulness of carbon.txt for disclosure discovery, and how they could use it to help domain owners populate their .eco profiles. They set about adding functionality to their .eco profiles platform with two aims:
- Populating profiles: Allowing .eco domains who have published disclosures in a carbon.txt file on their domain to fetch that information and add it to their .eco profiles.
- Creating carbon.txt files: Enabling any organisation with a .eco profile to use the contents of that profile to generate a carbon.txt file which can then be hosted on their domain.
Making the creation of carbon.txt files a one-click process will hopefully encourage more domain owners to adopt a standardised way of sharing their sustainability disclosures. It also allows for .eco to periodically automatically search carbon.txt files, and update .eco profiles based on the information they contain. Learn more about how .eco profiles and carbon.txt work together at https://go.eco/news/where-is-your-sustainability-report/.
Expanding the carbon.txt syntax to support more disclosure types
When the .eco team originally built functionality into their profile pages, the carbon.txt syntax was limited to accepting links to disclosure documents such as annual reports. Since then, we’ve begun exploring how certification schemes can be included as disclosures within carbon.txt files.
These kinds of disclosures are also included in .eco profiles. Once introduced into the carbon.txt syntax, another part of .eco profiles could potentially be automatically generated and kept up-to-date.
We’re currently aware of a few other digital service providers who have built some carbon.txt functionality into their platforms. As we continue to expand the syntax and supported document types, we hope that more platforms like .eco profiles can utilise carbon.txt to surface sustainability disclosures. If this seems interesting to you, we’d love to hear from you – are you already using carbon.txt in your tooling, or do you have ideas you’d like to explore?
