MD Angus Bradley provides his thoughts on a changing climate, and where safedrop and its carbon emissions stands amongst things…
safedrop is all about reducing our carbon emissions as well as wasted time, so we thought it was about time we offset all our carbon emissions, even if they’re not massive – every little counts!
Here’s a super simple way to offset your emissions – should take about 20 minutes if you have a simple business like ours, longer if you have to workout transport costs and flights.
For us, everyone is working at home at the moment, so I did some research for home worker carbon usage, and came up with this:
Home worker carbon emissions
If the average employee heats just their home office for an extra four hours a day, then this will incur estimated costs of 180 kg CO2 (source)
180Kg CO2 for heating a home office 4 hours a day
70Kg CO2 for new laptop (based on 214 kilograms of CO2 for new laptop every 3 years (source) – we use MacBooks, which tend to last at least 3 years.
175Kg running desktop (or laptop with monitor) for 8 hours a day (source)
Total extra carbon for a home worker/year = 425Kg CO2.
For us thats 7 workers x 425kg = 3,000Kg.
Servers
We’re a server-heavy business, our sister business projectfusion.com hosts a lot of dedicated servers. From go climate I guesstimated 458 kg CO2e / year per server, and rounded it up.
Total extra carbon per cloud server = 458Kg CO2
Total server carbon = 22 servers x 500Kg = 11,000Kg
Transport & Flights
Due to COVID-19, we don’t do this at the moment!
Office
Our office is already carbon neutral!
Contingency – deliveries and stuff – don’t sweat, just pay more!
We don’t do much else, but there are some consumables, FedEx and the like, and loads of other cloud services we use, so I’ll just add a 20% contingency.
Add 20% or if you’re guessing everything, why not add 100%!
Total = (Servers + Home workers + office etc) * 1.2 = 17,000Kg CO2 (that’s a lot of carbon!)
Then I went to the good folks at https://carbonfund.org/projects/ and chose a project. I like trees, so went for a re-foresting project in Panama.
Done – this will now take about 20 mins every year, and should offset our emissions. I’m not sure carbon offsetting is ideal, and we continue to choose hosts that are carbon neutral where we can, and to avoid carbon heavy routes, but its a good step nevertheless.
The cost to offset is about $10 per tonne.
We choose Carbonfund as they are a certified member of onepercentfortheplanet – so I know I can trust that the money is being used wisely, as they are audited. We are also a member of 1% for the planet, giving 1% of turnover to climate causes!
