Using DitchCarbon with Rows.com

A veteran of the SaaS industry having scaled to exit businesses in the marketing automation, Social and IoT spaces. Ex Brandwatch, Cision. Founder of DitchCarbon.
At DitchCarbon, we’re making it possible to embed carbon data into any application, and that includes spreadsheets!

If you’re using Rows.com spreadsheets, follow the guide below if:

  1. You want to know the carbon footprint of your spend at a company
  2. You want to know the carbon footprint of a product you’ve bought or are buying
  3. You want to know which companies are taking action on climate from a list provided

1. The carbon footprint of my spend at a company

Say you’re doing your end-of-year accounting and have compiled a Rows.com spreadsheet with your expenses. Each row contains:

  1. A company name in column A
  2. The total spend at this company in column B

To find the carbon footprint (in kilograms of CO2-equivalent emissions), create another column C, and paste in the following formula:

=GET(CONCATENATE(“https://api.ditchcarbon.com/v1.0/calculate?”,
“supplier=”,A2,”&”,”amount=”,B2),PAIR2JSON(“Authorization”,(“Bearer <YOUR_TOKEN_HERE>”)))

Replace <YOUR_TOKEN_HERE> with your DitchCarbon API token, which you should be able to access from your account dashboard.

Once you hit <ENTER>, Rows.com sends an API request to our database containing the company name in that row and your total spend at this company. Once you see the button labelled “data”, press on it, and then press “Inspect Data” in the resulting dropdown.

You should see a sidebar appear on the right side of the screen. Once you expand the folder-like structure labelled “data”, you’ll find the calculated carbon footprint (in kilograms of CO2-equivalent emissions).

Return to the spreadsheet momentarily and create another column D. Rows.com will automatically paste the result of the API request into this column, once you configure the following step.

Return to the sidebar, press on the calculated carbon footprint and select cell D2 as the destination. Then, duplicate the formula in column C into every row and watch Rows.com magically paste the carbon footprint of your expense into column D.

That’s it, you’re all done! If you’ve done it right, you should see a table like the following. Feel free to enter another amount for Dell by editing the text field to try out the API!


Of course, you can specify more options alongside the company and your spend when you create the API request. If you’re dealing with more than one currency, for example, and the currency (in the form “GBP”, “USD”, etc.) was stored in column E, change the formula in column C to the following:

=GET(CONCATENATE(“https://api.ditchcarbon.com/v1.0/calculate?”,”supplier=”,A2,”&”,”amount=”,B2,”&”,”amount_currency=”,E2),PAIR2JSON(“Authorization”,(“Bearer <YOUR_TOKEN_HERE>”)))

For a full list of options for this API endpoint, visit https://docs.ditchcarbon.com/reference/runcalculation.

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2. The carbon footprint of a product I’ve bought or am buying

Say you’re writing a To-Buy list and have compiled a Rows.com spreadsheet that lists products you have bought or are considering buying. Each row contains:

  1. A manufacturer name in column A
  2. A product name in column B

To find the carbon footprint if a purchase was made (in kilograms of CO2-equivalent emissions), create another column C, and paste in the following formula:

=GET(CONCATENATE(“https://api.ditchcarbon.com/v1.0/product?”,”manufacturer=”,A2,”&”,”name=”,B2),PAIR2JSON(“Authorization”,(“Bearer <YOUR_TOKEN_HERE>”)))

Replace <YOUR_TOKEN_HERE> with your DitchCarbon API token, which you should be able to access from your account dashboard.

Once you hit <ENTER>, Rows.com sends an API request to our database containing the manufacturer and product name in that row. Once you see the button labelled “data”, press on it, and then press “Inspect Data” in the resulting dropdown.

You should see a sidebar appear on the right side of the screen. Once you expand the folder-like structure labelled “data”, you’ll find the calculated carbon footprint (in kilograms of CO2-equivalent emissions).

Return to the spreadsheet momentarily and create another column D. Rows.com will automatically paste the result of the API request into this column, once you configure the following step.

Return to the sidebar, press on the calculated carbon footprint and select cell D2 as the destination. Then, duplicate the formula in column C into every row and watch Rows.com magically paste the carbon footprint of your expense into column D.

That’s it, you’re all done! If you’ve done it right, you should see a table like the following. Feel free to replace “iPhone 13” with another product by editing the text field to try out the API!

Of course, you can specify more options alongside the manufacturer and product name when you create the API request. If you want to specify how many months the product would be used for, for example, and this number was stored in column E, change the formula in column C to the following:

=GET(CONCATENATE(“https://api.ditchcarbon.com/v1.0/product?”,”manufacturer=”,A2,”&”,”name=”,B2,”&”,”months=”,E2),PAIR2JSON(“Authorization”,(“Bearer <YOUR_TOKEN_HERE>”)))

For a full list of options for this API endpoint, visit https://docs.ditchcarbon.com/reference/lookupproduct

3. The carbon footprint per ÂŁ1 spent at a company

Say you’re compiling a report on which companies are taking action on climate and have compiled a Rows.com spreadsheet with a list of companies to analyse. Each row contains a company name.

To find the carbon footprint (in kilograms of CO2-equivalent emissions) created by this company for every ÂŁ1 spent, create another column B, and paste in the following formula:

=GET(CONCATENATE(“https://api.ditchcarbon.com/v1.0/supplier?”,”name=”,A2),PAIR2JSON(“Authorization”,(“Bearer <YOUR_TOKEN_HERE>”)))

Replace <YOUR_TOKEN_HERE> with your DitchCarbon API token, which you should be able to access from your account dashboard.

Once you hit <ENTER>, Rows.com sends an API request to our database containing the company name in that row. Once you see the button labelled “data”, press on it, and then press “Inspect Data” in the resulting dropdown.

You should see a sidebar appear on the right side of the screen. Once you expand the folder-like structure labelled “data”, you’ll find the calculated carbon footprint (in kilograms of CO2-equivalent emissions) created by this company for every £1 spent.

Return to the spreadsheet momentarily and create another column C. Rows.com will automatically paste the result of the API request into this column, once you configure the following step.

Return to the sidebar, press on the calculated carbon footprint and select cell C2 as the destination. Then, duplicate the formula in column B into every row and watch Rows.com magically paste the carbon footprint per ÂŁ1 spent at the company into column C.

That’s it, you’re all done! If you’ve done it right, you should see a table like the following. Feel free to replace “Dell” with another company by editing the text field to try out the API!

Of course, you can specify more options alongside the company name when you create the API request. If you’re dealing with more than one currency, for example, and the currency (in the form “GBP”, “USD”, etc.) was stored in column D, change the formula in column B to the following:

=GET(CONCATENATE(“https://api.ditchcarbon.com/v1.0/supplier?”,”name=”,A2,”&”,”currency=”,D2),PAIR2JSON(“Authorization”,(“Bearer <YOUR_TOKEN_HERE>”)))

For a full list of options for this API endpoint, visit https://docs.ditchcarbon.com/reference/lookupsupplier.

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