Netguru to Achieve Climate Neutrality by the End of 2022
In 2021, we became an active participant of Climate Leadership powered by the UN Environment Programme and, we committed to take action towards achieving climate neutrality, with a major focus on greenhouse gas emissions.
It’s been a few months since we declared it. Today, we are happy to share that we have completed this part of the journey – and that’s an important step. We took the challenge and identified our CO2 emission sources and any information that could help us measure our impact.
Today, we’re committing ourselves to achieving carbon neutrality by the end of 2022.
“At Netguru, we’re continuously moving towards realizing our vision of a sustainable digital future – we’re a B Corp certified company, and we have committed ourselves to develop a positive impact on other people and our planet. This year, thanks to the support from the Climate Leadership experts, we’ve analyzed and calculated our direct and indirect climate footprint in all three scopes. Already today, 98 percent of our data is stored on climate-neutral servers. The cloud, however, is just one of our emission sources, which is why we’re now working on achieving full climate neutrality by the end of 2022. I hope other companies will join this challenge too.” says Marek Talarczyk, CEO at Netguru.
All 3 Scopes Calculated
At Netguru, we have calculated our CO2 emissions and identified their sources in all three scopes: direct, indirect and in-value chain. In 2020, we emitted 391 tons, mostly through office and IT equipment energy consumption and cloud.
Following international guidance, scope 1 covers direct emissions from owned or controlled sources (e.g. local office heating), scope 2 covers indirect emissions from the generation of purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling, while scope 3 includes all other indirect emissions that occur in our value chain (e.g. business travel).
Our CO2 emissions were estimated as carbon dioxide equivalent. It’s a metric used to compare the emissions from various greenhouse gases on the basis of their global-warming potential (GWP), by converting amounts of other gases to the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide with the same global warming potential.
- Emission per employee in 2020 was 600 kilograms, and in the first quarter of 2021, it was 120 kilograms.
- Our main emission sources were: energy usage in the offices (61% for 2020 and 72% for 2021), power consumption of laptops and monitors (9% and 11%), cloud computing (8% and 10%).
“We’ve thoroughly analyzed our carbon footprint taking into account all three scopes of emissions. Since the majority of our organization works remotely, we also looked at the energy used by home appliances. Now, the real challenge begins: looking for further ways to reduce our emissions in the remote work model, and smart offsetting of what cannot be reduced.” says Karolina Długosz, Sustainability Lead at Netguru.
For more details go further below.
Going Carbon Neutral!
As an active participant in the second edition of the “Climate Leadership powered by UN ENVIRONMENT” programme, we’re committed to take action towards achieving climate neutrality, with a major focus on greenhouse gas emissions. It is crucial that such action is taken, not only by companies with large supply chains, but by every company to become aware of their impact and their ability to develop a sustainability strategy. Emissions in the IT/ICT sector can result from database and server infrastructure, business travel, use of office spaces, and various other energy-intensive tech equipment and resources. By analyzing their own carbon footprint, organizations can plan their actions in order to reduce their impact and can achieve the climate neutrality that is crucial for preventing the negative effects of climate change.
Calculations and Estimation Details
What did the calculations include? To present you with a better picture, we broke CO2 emissions down into a few categories:
Offices' energy consumption
During 2020 and Q1 2021 we had 8 offices. The electricity consumption was the highest at our HQ in Poznań, PL (83% of emissions). To estimate the emission we used indicators from the Polish KOBIZE database. Most of our offices are heated with electric power and built-in ventilation systems. Only one office was heated by a furnace powered by natural gas.
IT equipment energy consumption
As almost all of our employees work from home, we counted the energy consumption of our laptops as separate emission sources. We also used emission indicators from the KOBIZE database.
The calculations are based on an average power consumption of different laptop models (from 22.5 to 48 W/h) and multiplied by the number of employees and standard eight-hour working days.
Cloud
We learned that most of our servers are carbon neutral: Google (100%), Microsoft (100%), and Amazon (98%).
Only 2% of working hours of our EC2 instances on AWS are emitting greenhouse gases. We calculated the emission from them based on the methodology presented by Benjamin Davy from Teads Engineering.
Business travel
There are two sources of emissions during business trips: transportation and hotels.
Transportation, especially flights, have a big influence on the greenhouse effect. We counted the kilometres travelled by our employees by trains and planes and multiplied it by indicators from the International Civil Aviation Organization and The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA UK).
As for hotels we have multiplied the number of hotel nights by the DEFRA indicator.
Fuel consumption by cars
Our company doesn't own many cars, the only ones we have are used by our board members. We have calculated the emission by multiplying the fuel used by indicators from PARP (PL). The emission from cars is responsible for less than 1.5% of all our emissions.
