What is carbon-negative?

For an entity to be carbon negative, it must reduce its carbon footprint to less than neutral, so that it removes more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it adds. For example, Bhutan is currently the only carbon-negative country in the world because it absorbs four times the amount of carbon it emits.

As greenhouse gas emissions such as CO2 warm the world closer to the 1.5C limit set by scientists, the increasing risks of climate change have to be factored in by governments and businesses alike. As well as humanitarian and environmental concerns, there is a very real threat to economic growth and prosperity, which is bad for business.

Uncertainty makes strategic investment difficult, and so climate risk is investment risk too. Ultimately climate change affects us all, and while governments play a huge role in combatting it, businesses can too.

By implementing solutions to decrease their carbon footprint, ideally to the point where they’re carbon-negative and taking carbon out of the atmosphere, businesses can contribute to a more secure future for themselves, society as a whole, and the natural world.

What is our yearly footprint CO2?

Our business model is designed to be as sustainable as can be. It’s something we work on constantly, as there are always ways to improve.

This encompasses the way our products are manufactured, delivered and disposed of, carbon offset programs such as tree planting, and also the way we conduct ourselves as a business, for example offsetting emissions from flights and only flying when we need to.

We believe that to be truly sustainable on all matters, it’s important to be fully transparent with ourselves, our partners and our customers, so that our processes can be evaluated, monitored and improved. As part of this, we measure our yearly CO2 footprint and make the information available for everyone, inviting recommendations from within and externally.

* all in tonnes

How We Compensate

• We offset the few airplane trips we take and avoid speaking at single-day events
• We offset all carbon emissions from production
• We carbon offset all shipments from the factories to our distribution centre
• We carbon offset all shipments from our distribution centre to our customers
• We plant extra trees in Zambia

What do we do to lower our footprint on a daily basis

• Every day we work to operate as sustainably as possible. We do not have an office and conduct 99% of our meetings online
• When we travel, we make sure it’s for a long term stay, no one-day events
• We do not go on fancy company summits to sunny places
• We evaluate the footprint on our supplier based on wastewater treatment, energy sources, and employee satisfaction
• We have people on the ground where our production takes place, who visit often and maintain the relationship
• We encourage our customers to use standard shipping
• We use stone paper as our packaging material, an environmentally friendlier alternative to tree-based or fossil fuel packaging.

Focus areas of 2020

A lot of organisations are speaking about what they want to do by 2030, 2040 and 2050. We believe that we need to act every day and instead of communicating that, we’re sharing our priorities for 2020.

Our priorities for 2020 are the following:

1. Influence all factories and partners to move to 100% renewable energy sources
2. Influence all factories to set-up wastewater programmes
3. Influence all factories to use LED-lighting
4. Launch a checklist on materials we believe in and focus on with others (lex Tesla is releasing it drawings)
5. Influence our distributors to increase investment in eco-vehicles and modes of transport
6. Address carbon-negativity in every podcast and event we speak at
7. Continue saying no to all products and factories where we can not be top-notch on sustainability and design
8. Launch A Good Foundation to aid initiatives that fight mindless consumerism and promote sustainability around the globe.

Deep dive

• We made 10 trips by train and three by air (Stockholm - Hong Kong) and (Copenhagen - London)
• Our servers:  https://cloud.google.com/sustainability/

• Trees are the best technology (according to a study from the University of Oxford aquí) to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and reverse global warming. We use their numbers.

• Shipping is compensated via The GoGreen Programme and Asendia.