Renee Morin is the chief sustainability officer at eBay, the world’s No. 2 online marketplace. In her role, Morin toggles among tasks ranging from calculating and showing the company’s progress on carbon emissions reductions to interacting with shareholders. She is also a big believer in eBay’s recommerce business: She bought her first item through the company in the 1990s, and recently said she convinced three friends to buy a cordless vacuum cleaner through the website. The online shopping boom inspired by the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the environmental costs of delivery trucks, transportation and packaging required to get goods to consumers. Enter eBay’s new circular commerce methodology report , spearheaded by Morin, which breaks down how the global company calculates the environmental benefits and reduced supply chain strain that shopping around used goods can have. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What are the main takeaways from the recommerce methodology report? Why should someone care about this? We really wanted to show transparency behind the work that we’ve been doing. I do think there’s been a groundswell around transparency in general, a lot of it being instigated by investors but just as well Gen Z, younger generations. They want to understand what you’re doing and they want to see. And we’re not hiding anything. So we wanted to put as much as we possibly could about the methodology about how we calculate these impacts. A lot of folks wouldn’t understand necessarily that there’s two different rates that get combined together to say how much of a used product is really displacing a new one? It’s not a 1:1 situation. I think that can be confused sometimes. Basically, what you need to look at is if I have one used sweater, would I have bought a new one, too? Likely, yes. You probably have a new one and a used one. For a laptop, not the same thing. If you buy a used laptop, you probably don’t also need to buy a new one. We’re not saying one used vacuum cleaner completely displaces one new vacuum cleaner. We want to be conservative and transparent about what those impacts really are. So it ends up being somewhere around 20 to 40 percent depending on the category you’re in, and those are the emissions that are avoided and that’s the waste that are now not being sent to a landfill. It seems, from your impact report , that Scope 3 emissions [those from assets not owned or controlled by the reporting entity] may have been more challenging for eBay. You have these absolute reduction goals. Specific to Scope 3, what’s your plan for cutting those down? It’s a multi-pronged strategy. By and large, the majority of our Scope 3 emissions are downstream transportation of products that are being sold by our sellers and delivered to our buyers. We’re a global company. So this first couple of years have really been trying to get our arms wrapped around the data and what the actual impact is from our goods being transported to multiple countries. So that’s step 1. Step 2, which is what we are doing currently internally, is what are we going to do to engage with our carriers in the United States and abroad and understand what their goals are to electrify their fleets. I think that’s going to be a real game-changer, which also takes electrifying the grid so we have renewable energy feeding into the vehicles. And then thirdly, we have our own responsibilities. How can we, as eBay, better present options online so our consumers are informed around a decision around transportation? And not necessarily just offsetting that by purchasing carbon offsets.
| 
