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For a small business – say, a design firm with 10 or 20 employees – it can be difficult to calculate the company’s carbon footprint. There is no sustainability department. There’s probably no budget for a sustainability advisor. And the process can seem lengthy, complex, and expensive. But a new website is helping small offices and retail stores estimate their emissions quickly and for free.

“You can get your number in a minute,” says Alex Lassiter, CEO of Green Places, the startup that developed the tool. Lassiter, a serial entrepreneur who has run other small businesses, saw from personal experience that a simpler way of calculating emissions data was needed.

The tool asks a few simple questions, including the location and type of business, the size of the office or store, the company’s transportation options, and the number of employees. It then uses detailed data from the University of California Berkeley’s CoolClimate project to estimate emissions.

[Screenshot: Green Places]After a company has calculated its carbon footprint, it can choose to purchase carefully verified carbon offsets, such as carbon offsets. B. support for forest restoration. Conceptually, the startup is only aimed at companies that already have a relatively small footprint. “I think one objection to offsets is that offsets are a way to cover up bad behavior,” says Lassiter. “We’re deliberately not chasing after companies that have large assets … most of the companies we talk to aren’t big polluters.” (Climate Neutral, a nonprofit with a more detailed appraisal tool, works with manufacturers who are more complex Have footprints.)

The startup also offers consulting services – acts like an external sustainability director – and makes suggestions for reducing emissions, such as employee ridesharing, hybrid remote work programs or composting in the office kitchen.

Green Places also creates sustainability pages for small business websites to communicate their progress and attract employees, and offers a Green Place to Work badge for companies to offset their footprint and create a plan to reduce emissions. Big companies “are trying to talk to this next generation of impact workers,” he says. “I don’t think small businesses are ready for this, and I really want to help them because I want them to be able to compete for the best talent.”