What AwardWallet solutions/technologies help build green start-ups and services?

With the growing focus on the need to urgently tackle environmental change, this has generated rapid growth in green start-ups and companies within the move to a green economy. The green economy is defined as an economy that is founded on sustainable development, with resource efficiency. A green economy is driven by the need to deliver reduced carbon emissions and pollution as well as the prevention of the loss of biodiversity. Individuals are being encouraged to reduce their “carbon footprint”. A carbon footprint is the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere as a result of the actions of a person. Green companies are springing up to offer individuals ways to both calculate and offset their carbon footprint.

Despite only being a relatively small contributor to the total amount of CO2, flying has become a key target for emission reductions. This may be because it is viewed as non-essential transport by some, and also because it is believed to be the privilege of the more wealthy parts of society. This has led to a phenomenon called ”flight shaming”. Travellers are feeling pressure to offset their flying emissions which leads to opportunities for green startups and established green companies to offer passengers ways to do this.

Green companies offer a variety of options to offset carbon emissions. Some such as AirCare, not only will calculate your projected emissions for a flight, but also offer ways to offset this. Other companies offer a yearly subscription based on your average amount of travel to offset your average emissions over a year.

The main challenge for green companies and startups offering to offset flying carbon emissions is getting the data in a cost-effective way. Many people wanting to negate their carbon footprint will be frequent flyers. Companies need to offer frequent travellers a simple way to enter their flight information without having to fill out long online forms with information. One solution is to use email parsing.

Email parsing APIs allow a company to scrape the information from an email such as a flight reservation and convert it into simple useable data. In this way, a customer can simply forward their email to the companies specific inbox rather than having to fill out a form to provide information. It is also possible for a client to sign up for inbox scraping which allows all flight reservation in their inbox to be identified and parsed automatically by the relevant company.

Reducing Carbon Footprint Technology

However, it can be prohibitively expensive for a start-up to build their own email parsing technology. This is where AwardWallet can help green start-ups by offering them an off the shelf email parsing solution at a competitive price.

AwardWallet is able to offer a fast, efficient and cost-effective email parsing service to assist green companies to import their clients’ flight data. As an example, AwardWallet currently works with AirCare, a green company that offers customers the chance to offset their flight carbon dioxide emissions. Potential clients are invited to forward their flight bookings to the AirCare generic email address rather than having to enter the details manually.

Once the traveller has forwarded their flight receipt email to AirCare, they receive an email back within a few minutes with their free report on the intended flight’s carbon emissions. AwardWallet make this possible with their automated email parsing service which extracts data from emails in a matter of seconds.

AirCare also include details in the email of the service they offer to offset the individual’s CO2. The customer is then able to purchase a way to remove an equivalent amount of CO₂ from the atmosphere in one of their Gold Standard carbon offset projects.

AwardWallet can parse a multitude of different email formats (list of supported email formats) to allow you to support potential customers’ needs.

For further information or to request a trial, contact us using this form. As well as being able to send you details of our competitive pricing, we can also offer you a chance to try our services.