Tax benefit (IRPJ and CSLL, Brazil)
Scope: this section applies to companies in Brazil, under Brazilian law. IRPJ is the Brazilian corporate income tax and CSLL the social contribution on net profit.
Legal basis: Law 9,249/1995, art. 13, §2, III. The deduction is limited to companies under the actual-profit regime (Lucro Real) and capped at 2% of operating profit for the period. The cap applies to the deductible base, not to the benefit.
Formula: deduction = minimum(amount donated, 2% × operating profit); benefit = deduction × 0.90 × combined IRPJ and CSLL rate. The 0.90 factor applies the 10% reduction set by Complementary Law 224/2025 on the incentivized portion.
Rates: the public calculator uses the conservative 24% scenario (IRPJ 15% plus CSLL 9%, no surtax), a net effect of 21.6% of the amount donated. For companies with annual profit above R$ 240,000, the 10% IRPJ surtax brings the combined rate to 34% and the net effect up to 30.6%. The client dashboard details the scenario that applies to the actual tax calculation.
Estimates for guidance only, not tax advice. The tax provision of Law 15,224/2025 was vetoed (Veto 1,403/2025); the deduction rests on Law 9,249/1995. Always confirm with an accountant.
Carbon: two layers, shown separately
Layer A, avoided landfill emissions: 0.86 kg CO₂e per kg of rescued food (US EPA, October 2023, landfill methane). This is the only part physically avoided by the decision to donate: the methane the food would have produced decomposing in a landfill, about 34 kg of CH₄ per tonne. Converted to CO₂e with GWP100 (AR5: CH4 = 25).
Layer B, displaced production footprint: life-cycle factors by food category (Poore and Nemecek, 2018, via Our World in Data), multiplied by a displacement rate of 0.5 (ReFED standard). Producing the food already caused emissions; donating does not undo them, but it keeps them from being wasted and displaces part of the new production the recipient would otherwise buy.
Display rule: the two layers appear separately on the dashboard, seal, certificate, public validation and exports, and are never added into one headline number.
Estimated avoided emissions. They are not part of the donor’s Scope 1, 2 or 3, cannot be deducted from a corporate inventory and cannot be used for neutralization, offsetting or carbon credits (FLW Protocol guidance, 2021). Factors are averages; values by category are approximations, and uncertainty is declared as required by the FLW Standard.
Associated blue water
We report blue water: fresh water taken from rivers and aquifers to produce the rescued food, by category, with a fallback of 130 L/kg when the category is not given. Donating does not save that water, which was already used in production; what it avoids is that the water was used for nothing. The grey component (a theoretical volume for diluting pollutants) is left out of the indicator.
Factors: Mekonnen and Hoekstra (2011, 2012), global averages for 1996 to 2005. They are not Brazil-specific values.
Equivalent meals
1 equivalent meal = 342 g (The Global FoodBanking Network). A 100 kg batch equals about 292 equivalent meals. These are equivalent meals, not meals served: the platform tracks kilograms, and actual distribution depends on each receiving organization. "Person-days" readings assume 3 meals per person per day.
Communication equivalences
Trees: 140 kg CO₂e per native Atlantic Forest tree kept for 20 years, that is 7 kg per tree per year (Instituto Totum, ESALQ/USP and SOS Mata Atlântica).
Car: 2,300 kg CO₂e per passenger car per year (IEMA national inventory, Brazil, base year December 2025).
Electricity: 0.0385 kg CO₂e per kWh (average factor of Brazil’s national grid, MCTI/SIRENE, base year 2023).
Avoided disposal cost
Brazilian national assumption: R$ 0.35 per kg, adding dedicated collection and transport (R$ 0.20/kg) and disposal in a landfill or waste treatment centre (R$ 0.15/kg). Regional bands: R$ 0.28 in the North and Northeast, R$ 0.35 in the South and Centre-West and R$ 0.50 in the Southeast, always at the conservative floor of the observed range. Amounts are in Brazilian reais (R$) and reflect Brazilian disposal prices.
When it applies: the saving only exists for companies that pay for private waste collection (large waste generators under Brazil’s National Solid Waste Policy, Law 12,305/2010, art. 20). When a company provides its actual disposal cost, the real figure replaces the assumption.
The full table by Brazilian state is on the page food disposal cost by state (in Portuguese).
Version and changelog
Current version: optima-ambiental-v2.0 (2026-08).
v2.0 (August 2026): carbon moved away from a single factor of 2.5 tCO₂e per tonne, which carried labels with no support in the primary sources ("GHG Protocol Scope 3" and "IPCC landfill factor"), to the two-layer model described above, with source and base year declared. Water moved from a fixed 1,500 L per kg to factors by category, reported as blue water. Meals moved from a 250 gram serving attributed to the FAO, an attribution not found in any FAO document, to 342 g per equivalent meal (The Global FoodBanking Network). The tree equivalence was corrected to 140 kg CO₂e over 20 years and the electricity equivalence to the average factor of Brazil’s national grid; the car equivalence was kept because it already had a Brazilian source.
v1 (2025): single factor of 2.5 tCO₂e per tonne, fixed water of 1,500 L per kg and a 250 gram meal. Reports issued under v1 remain valid and reproducible in the version in which they were issued.
Why you can trust these numbers
The factors on this page are the same code constants that calculate the numbers inside the platform: when a factor changes, the page changes with it, and the methodology version is recorded. Every indicator shown in a report can be traced back to the original donation, with a signed receipt, an audit trail that cannot be edited and public validation by QR code. More details in the article how we calculate avoided CO₂ (in Portuguese).