Rabo launches climate conscious credit card

Instead of investing a straight percentage of card proceeds into environmental funds, the new card will look at the type of purchase - such as consumer goods, air travel or petrol - and pay a proportionate sum into projects run by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

Contributions are based on the impact of purchases on greenhouse gases. So buying petrol would result in a higher contribution to an environmentally-friendly project than paying for goods in a supermarket.

Johan van de Gronden, head of the WWF in the Netherlands, told Reuters reporters that the charity wanted to come up with a way to align consumer behaviours with a compensation mechanism.