Inside a Project-Based Internship with C02RAL Consulting
There are plenty of products online today with a “green,” “conscious,” or “eco-friendly” label. But how can companies understand the nuances behind being eco-friendly, and avoid inadvertently “greenwashing” their product?
This was part of the problem Dylan ’29 and Elsa ’28 tackled during their novel project-based internships with C02RAL Consulting, under the guidance of Alexandra Uribe ’14. Over the course of fall 2025, Dylan and Elsa dug into corporate data, each producing a white paper on different facets of greenwashing.
Greenwashing “is basically the concept of overstating your sustainability or environmental claims,” Alexandra explains. “A lot of people always see this as having a…sense of malice, or malintent, but oftentimes greenwashing is just a lack of really understanding, where someone just says something and overstates it because they don’t know any better.”
The Genesis of C02RAL’s Project-Based Internship
Short term work experiences can be just as meaningful as structured internships. The Center for Career Design put out a call to action to employers, especially alumni, to submit short-term projects that they needed assistance with and which students could gain valuable experience doing.
Project-based internships enable employers to get help with timely projects without having to create an entire internship program, and allow students to dip their toes into the world of work while balancing their busy schedules at Dartmouth, without committing to a full-time off-term role.
Of the creation of C02RAL’s project-based internship, Alexandra relates, “This ended up being a surprise project. Someone from the [Center for Career Design] reached out to me to find out from alumni that are in non-traditional career paths…what their career trajectory has been, how Dartmouth helped them…[and] what Dartmouth can do for current students to help them on these non-traditional paths.”
The conversation prompted Alexandra to reflect on her own professional journey and how she could give back: “I was like, yeah, it would have been great to have more opportunities to have real-world experience, real-world research. In those discussions, I realized that I had something that I could offer with my team.”
Alexandra founded C02RAL during the pandemic. A sustainability consulting company, C02RAL “helps companies across industries–mostly small to medium-sized companies–to reduce their environmental impact.” More recently, the company “has been focused on quantifying and measuring that impact through carbon accounting or through other sustainability ratings.” C02RAL also works in communications to help their clients measure and accurately report on the eco-friendly nature of their products in a data-informed manner, so that they do not accidentally greenwash their services.
C02RAL’s goal is to help companies “be more transparent and make better claims, and, at the end of the day, drive consumer trust.” Recently, C02RAL created “a digital tool that scans written text from brands, companies, websites, anything, and is able to give a risk indicator for greenwashing. It ranks and analyzes that entire text within [the] context of what the risk is of a company being transparent, or inversely, of greenwashing.”
That’s where the project-based internship came in, Alexandra says. “I went back to the career team and was like, hey, look, I have a program… If there are students that want to use this tool to do some research, to develop their own analyses and write a white paper that we can publish with their name on it, then that can be great for them, and it could be a great use of my tool. So that’s exactly what we did.”
With the help of the Center for Career Design, Alexandra drafted a project-based internship and submitted it to Dartmouth’s job and internship platform, Handshake. Students applied, and from that pool, Elsa and Dylan were selected.
Why Project-Based? A Student Perspective
“It just seemed like the perfect type of experience to give me some hard skills and a better idea of what sustainability consulting actually is, and what it looks like in practice,” says Elsa.
For Dylan and Elsa, the appeal of this specific internship was its practicality.
Dylan, who is studying Quantitative Social Science, had plenty of experience with academic research, but he wanted to see how data is used in the actual business world: “I hadn’t really done research that was focused on trying to actually make change within the capitalist sphere, rather than the academic sphere.”
He was looking for a chance to apply his skills to corporate behavior, wanting to see firsthand how data can be used to keep companies accountable: “This was a really cool opportunity for me to take data and then actually make a difference by showing others how they can properly make sure they’re not lying about their sustainability practices, and overall, hopefully help them to become more sustainable.”
Elsa, an Economics and Environmental Studies major from Seattle, came at it from a different angle. As an avid skier and outdoor enthusiast, Elsa already had a personal interest in sustainability consulting.” However, Elsa says, “I didn’t have any experience… I feel like I knew what it was in theory, but not in practice… It just seemed like the perfect type of experience to give me some hard skills and a better idea of what sustainability consulting actually is, and what it looks like in practice.”
During their internship, Dylan and Elsa worked with the web-scraping tool built by C02RAL, which scans and organizes public sustainability reports and marketing materials from major consumer brands.
Elsa chose to focus her research on the beauty and cosmetics industry. Using the tool, she tracked how corporate messaging in the beauty sector has shifted over the last five years, noting a significant spike in environmental marketing that began around 2020.
Dylan took on the data organization side. He processed the information the tool gathered, looking closely at how often companies used specific terms, like those related to sustainability education. His goal was to organize the raw numbers to clearly show the gap between what companies say publicly and the concrete steps they are actually taking.
The Results Are In: A Resounding Succees
Reflecting on the students’ work, Alexandra notes, “I was very surprised at the engagement of these students, and the seriousness with which they took these projects, of just wanting to do so much research.”
“It was surprising in a beautiful way to see how engaged they were with the topic, despite never having dealt with…greenwashing before,” Alexandra recounts.
Working with Dylan and Elsa also brought unique benefits to C02RAL. “What was really helpful, too, is getting myself out of my bubble,” Alexandra says, explaining, “These students have or previously had no interaction with this kind of commercial sustainability world, and bringing them in step-by-step and educating them on what the scope of research was…was definitely a little bit of a learning process for me, too.”
Overall, the projects offered a clear look into how the sustainability industry is maturing. Alexandra notes that the business world is moving away from vague, overarching labels and focusing much more on concrete risk management and regulatory compliance.
Dylan and Elsa walked away from their project-based internship with practical data analysis skills, a clearer sense of their career goals, and two white papers. Meanwhile, Alexandra gained focused, driven help to test her firm’s data-scraping tool and illustrate its myriad uses.
Ultimately, their success story encapsulates what project-based internships do best: give students real work and experience without having to commit themselves to a multi-week, full-time opportunity, and provide employers with timely help on critical projects and tasks.
