Pearl Jam, Seattle businesses take on carbon

Seattle-based rock band Pearl Jam is partnering with environmental nonprofit Forterra to recruit businesses to a new program that calculates carbon output, and then works to minimize it and mitigate it through planting trees that absorb carbon.

“Twenty years ago recycling wasn’t something that we (as Americans) did - It just wasn’t,” Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard said. “We’d throw everything in the landfill. And in Seattle and a lot of different regions now, that’s changed. There’s an obsessiveness with creating compost and filling up your recycle bin knowing your garbage cans were one-third of what they were years ago. That was an evolution of thought, and we’re trying to really inspire that same sort of revolution in regards to energy use and carbon.”

So far 12 businesses have signed on as founding partners in the Carbon Capturing Companies (C3) project, including the Seahawks, Sounders FC, Outdoor Research, Woodland Park Zoo and the Seattle Aquarium, among others.

The idea is to encourage companies to track and be transparent about their carbon output and finding a way to balance out the impact.

“This is a very interesting experiment,” said Gene Duvernoy, Forterra’s president. “I don’t think it could have generated itself anywhere but the progressive Northwest, which has that kind of corporate involvement and recognition of the impact of their businesses.”

Read more in the Puget Sound Business Journal.