April 21, 2022
Providing the next generation with a habitable planet is all of our responsibility; we’re doing our fair share.
As a company that prepares young learners for the future, we seek to ensure that the future is also prepared to sustain them. Providing the next generation with a habitable planet is all of our responsibility; we’re doing all we can to do our fair share. Our industry and forward-thinking go hand-in-hand; we know that protecting the environment is crucial to the health and wellbeing of the future of our students.
It is our greatest desire that today’s children may be able to enjoy nature as we do today. Nature is not only aesthetically delightful and a major supplier of important resources, it’s also a critical source of inspiration for many of our greatest modern engineering innovations. That's why we are making a focused effort to be transparent about our company’s current carbon footprint and what we’re doing to help improve and conserve the environment. Once we establish and communicate our current effect, we can hold ourselves accountable and ensure that we continue to make improvements in reducing our company’s carbon footprint.
We are currently hosting our platform on Digital Ocean. Though some of their servers, particularly those in Europe, run on clean energy, the company is not currently running on renewable energy. One representative, however, informed our company that in the future, “investments will be made to offset [their] carbon footprint”, but that they don’t yet own the data centers they use so their control over energy consumption is currently limited. We look forward to Digital Ocean’s efforts to improve its sustainability. Using WebsiteCarbon.com, we were able to calculate that we produce roughly 85 kg (187.4 lbs) of carbon dioxide annually.
For much of our internal data storage, including emails, we use Google. We’re happy to share that Google has a net-zero carbon footprint. With their continued implementation of green energy, we look forward to using Google’s tools as it works towards having all of its data centers function without any output of carbon.
As Covid-19 made its way into the United States, our company decided to move out of our office. After two years of working from home, we’ve found the benefits of a work-from-home environment to far outweigh the cons. As a byproduct, we’ve been able to drastically cut down on car emissions. By our estimates, switching to remote work has prevented an annual 130,000 lbs of CO2 from entering our atmosphere, meaning that as of April 21st, 2022, we’ve almost saved 300,000 pounds of C02 emissions!
When our work requires us to travel to events and conferences, our workers do what they can to limit their carbon footprint by carpooling and taking energy-efficient routes and forms of transport.
Since we’ve been remote, we’ve also been able to significantly reduce our use of paper and gasoline. We have, however, increased our use of online communication tools like email, zoom, slack, and other applications. Though our transition decreased the amount of carbon emissions by our company, we acknowledge that this solution is not yet perfect. Along with improving the efficiency of our online communication, we will continue to search for better, greener office communication alternatives.
If you’re part of a company that offers carbon-neutral management solutions (or just have a recommendation), you can contact us here.
We have recently swapped our commercial website over to WebFlow. Using WebsiteCarbon.com, we’ve found that our commercial website produces roughly 165.2 kg (364.1 lbs) of CO2 annually. To decrease this number, we are actively working on optimizing and improving the efficiency of this site. We hope in the following months to see a significant decrease in emissions.
Along with continuing to improve our climate impact transparency and increasing our efficiency, we’re honoring Earth Day this year by planting 50 trees with One Tree Planted. We chose to plant our trees in National Parks throughout the United States, so that the children we’re teaching may one day pass by the trees that their school has now helped fund by partnering with us. With this initiative, we’ll be able to offset our company’s current carbon emissions.
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Olivia has background in behavioral ecology and data analysis. She develops and implements SEO, CRO, social media strategy, and authors multi-disciplinary content for our blog, & our social media sites. She's contributed to many of the STEM tie-ins within our curriculum, authored our SEL course, and is a specialist in neurodiverse learning strategies.
