It has been a year already since Nowtilus' sustainability journey officially took off.
Last December we drew up our CO2 reduction plan and we calculated the emissions on our own but this year, to certify and give continuity to our effort, we partnered with Greenly, the go-to carbon accounting platform run by climate experts and trusted by more than 1,500 businesses around the world.
Why have we chosen Greenly? While we also want to make sure we do not enact greenwashing, we find it particularly important to rely on a trustworthy partner with the right expertise to support us in our green transition.
Greenly, founded in 2019, is a global carbon management platform labeled B-Corp, which helps companies measure, monitor, and reduce their carbon footprint while also allowing them to create audit-grade reporting through the ADEME & GHG Protocol methodologies.
Thanks to their help, we recalculated our carbon footprint for the year 2022 and it seems that our estimation was a bit pessimistic since we produced 40t of CO2e instead of the 49 we had estimated last year but we did not deviate by too much proving that our calculation was quite accurate. The additional 9t of CO2e were based on a more conservative approach which led us to add the estimated emissions of our employees working from home.
Our 2022 carbon consumption of 40t of CO2e is broken down as follows:
Digital: 23t of CO2e
Travel and Commute: 12t of CO2e
Energy: 3t of CO2e
Assets: 2t of CO2e
Being a SaaS cloud company, the majority of the emissions for us are digital ones.
This is one of the main reasons why, apart from always offering the most efficient and best-performing software on the market to our customers, we have just launched Poseidon, a more advanced version of our Serverside.ai platform that, with improved capabilities will result in cost-savings and, most importantly in terms of relevance for this article, less energy consumption. Poseidon represents our concerted effort to provide the fastest SSAI engine in the world. As logic and non-quantum computing dictate, faster speed is only possible with less processing (i,e, fewer machine commands being executed by the CPU). Fewer instructions to the CPU translate directly to less power consumption and thus lower emissions. Current tests show that our new machine halves processing over the previous product solution and we will continue to monitor and report the positive outcomes during the next year.
Making our platform more efficient is not enough though. Everybody knows that data centers consume a significant amount of energy for operations, such as server power and cooling systems. GHG emissions, however, vary based on the geographical distribution of equipment and the carbon intensity of electricity in each country. That is why we are committed to selecting data centers with even lower carbon electricity than the ones we are currently relying on to further reduce our emissions.
Since we already have a hybrid work setting with about 50% of our employees who are full-remote, the travel & commute energy consumption is already lower than the average for a company operating at a global level like ours.
Anyway, even if both according to our emission reduction plan drafted last year and our recent commitment with Greenly, we favor trains over planes for company business travel, we cannot avoid using the latter for long distances.
That is why, as we announced in June, we partnered with a European tree plantation project, located in Germany in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern area, to offset the emissions we are not able to eliminate yet.
Project Boddin, this association takes its name from the municipality that hosts it, has already planted the first “Nowtilus trees” which in a very few months are already growing in leaps and bounds as you can see in the gallery below:
To summarize, in continuing with our sustainability journey, we have decided to work with the global carbon management platform, Greenly.
Nowtilus’ goals in this partnership are:
Measure our carbon footprint for the following years to have a better understanding of our emissions.
Raise awareness among our employees about the company’s environmental impact and sustainability topics in general to encourage them to embrace more sustainable work and life behaviors
Implement effective actions to reduce our emissions in the long term.
We would like to thank Greenly for their support and all our people for their involvement in building a better planet.
We will keep you updated on our progress and remember that, if we want to limit human activity's carbon emissions as much as we can, companies around the world need to engage all on this front, no matter the sector.
If you want to know more about our partnership with Greenly and our other sustainability initiatives and want to participate, feel free to contact us!