JOOB is Officially Climate Neutral, Thanks to South Pole and Climate Neutral
Being a truly eco-conscious company goes beyond using sustainable fabrics, volunteering for local environmental groups, and donating to 1% for the Planet (though these are all initiatives we're proud of). We're taking it a step further by striving to be climate (or carbon) neutral by partnering with South Pole.
In order to be a climate neutral company, we knew we had to first assess our carbon footprint. We began by calculating our personal carbon footprint (more on that here), but assessing a company's emissions proved to be a bit tricky. Enter South Pole, a Zurich-based consultancy and global carbon project management organization that helps businesses and governments across the globe to calculate their carbon emissions, find ways to reduce them, and invest in carbon-reduction programs that are creating real positive social and ecological impact and provide quantifiable reductions in CO2 emissions.
South Pole's expertise covers a wide array of services and data assessment best practices to help companies understand their emissions. They initially helped us with our household emissions analysis, and then we worked on JOOB's end to end supply chain. Because to be truly climate neutral, a company should be evaluating source to customer processes and emissions. It was a real challenge to get some of our partners to help us calculate their emissions, and in many cases it was the first time they've been asked this question by a retailer. We had to use benchmark data from South Pole to fill in the gaps, and will be continuing to work with suppliers to improve how they measure emissions going forward so we can be as accurate as possible in understanding our emissions contribution.
Once we understood our unavoidable emissions, we invested in one of South Pole's many projects they manage globally. The projects not only focus on emissions reductions, but other impacts such as public health, work environment, poverty reduction, and industry innovation just to name a few.
JOOB has contributed part of its Kickstarter funds to South Pole's Siam Cement Group Biomass to Energy initiative in Thailand, which uses renewable biomass instead of fossil fuels to produce cement across 5 factories. This investment will more than offset our end to end emissions, enabling us to be climate neutral for 2018, and we're already looking into projects to fund for 2019.
We hope every company and every CEO will have climate neutrality as a core initiative and value. Let's give our next generation a planet that is alive and well.
Update November 2019
After JOOB had received its climate neutral certification with South Pole in early 2019, a new non-profit organization based in the US, Climate Neutral, was started with the goal of identifying brands who are making the efforts to be climate neutral, and developing a simple certification process to help brands reach their goals. After discovering this new team JOOB was able to submit it's 2018 supply chain information on emissions, plans for 2019 reductions, and our offset projects - and were among the first group of brands to receive Climate Neutral's certified climate neutral status.
Pairing business’ need for simplicity with the planet’s need for urgent action, Climate Neutral is a platform that connects organizations with the tools and partners to reliably - and quickly - neutralize their footprint, and a certification that amplifies the visibility and value of a brand taking responsibility for their carbon.
We are grateful to organizations such as Climate Neutral and South Pole to help businesses understand and implement climate neutral initiatives.
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