Gurugram-based online bus booking company Zingbus has partnered with Sequoia-backed Climate Finance startup, Climes.
The travel startup offers carbon neutralisation as an option to its passengers in over 500 cities in 17 states through a fleet of over 350 buses. As part of the partnership, Zingbus users will have the choice to neutralise the amount of CO2 emitted during their journey at minimal prices in a single click.
The Climes’ tech stack calculates the emissions from the bus journey using factors like bus model, seating capacity, and more. For a person traveling from Delhi to Manali, neutralising their emissions could cost as little as Rs. 3 – which is contributed to verified carbon reduction projects on the Climes platform.
To understand carbon emissions, neutralising 1 kg of carbon emissions is the same as turning off all the electricity at your home for 7 hours. For Zingbus, each passenger ride emits an average of 3-5 kgs of carbon emissions. So, every time someone neutralises their ride, they save emissions of 21-35 hours worth of electricity.
So far, at least 65% of passengers have neutralised their carbon footprints through Climes’ API found on zingbus’ checkout page.
Prashant Kumar, CEO & Co-Founder, Zingbus said, “Our first step towards sustainability was to service more passengers per bus per day, so that we can automatically decrease carbon emissions by 15-20%. Secondly, with Climes, we encourage our passengers to neutralize their carbon footprint by paying just a nominal amount.”
Anirudh Gupta, Co-founder, Climes, said, “As one of the most essential but environmentally detrimental industries, travel and transportation are heavily in need of new and innovative forms of climate action.”
The company also plans to move to electric buses, with around 1,000 such buses getting deployed in the next 3-4 years.
