Carbon.txt API

The carbon.txt API allows you to validate the syntax and content of carbon.txt files, and to look up the carbon.txt file for a given domain.

carbon.txt makes sustainability data easier to discover and use on the web. Carbon.txt is a single, discoverable location on any web domain for public, machine-readable, sustainability data relating to that company.

It’s a web-first, connect not collect style approach, of most benefit to those interested in scraping the structured data companies have to publish according to national laws. Designed to be extended by default, we see carbon.txt becoming essential infrastructure for sustainability data services crunching available numbers and sharing the stories it can tell.

Why carbon.txt?

1. Discovery of sustainability data continues to be a problem. Our research with Wikirate made it abundantly clear that without new, webby approaches, sustainability data will continue to be hard to find or out of date.
2. Changes in the law mean that lots of firms will need to publish all kinds of sustainability data that previously they didn’t have to. The law literally says they need to publish this data online, free of charge for the public to see, and there are significant GDPR-scale fees for non-compliance.
3. New standards mean that this data will be comparable, machine-readable, and likely across different parts of the world. This could make verifying claims and identifying greenwashing easier, if it’s done right.
4. Carbon.txt is our open-source project to make this sustainability information easier to discover. Carbon.txt is a spec that defines predictable, consistent places on any website to publish sustainability data so that both humans and machines can find it.

These docs

The documentation in this section is aimed at developers looking to use the carbon.txt API provided by the Green Web Foundation to discover, validate, and parse carbon.txt files and their contents. General information about carbon.txt for a non-technical audience is available on the carbon.txt website.

This documentation covers:

• Authenticating requests made to the carbon.txt API
• Using the carbon.txt API to discover and parse carbon.txt files on a given web domain
• Using the carbon.txt API to discover and parse carbon.txt files at a specific public URL
• Using the carbon.txt API to parse carbon.txt content directly

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