April 22, 2023
It's our shared responsibility to provide the next generation with a habitable planet. We're doing our part.
As an organization committed to preparing young learners for the future, we recognize the crucial importance of ensuring that the planet they inherit is capable of sustaining them. It is our shared responsibility to provide the next generation with a habitable planet, and we are fully committed to doing our part. Our industry is characterized by innovation and forward-thinking, and we understand that safeguarding the environment is integral to the health and well-being of our students' future.
Our ultimate aspiration is for today's children to enjoy the same natural wonders that we do today. The environment is not only visually stunning and a vital source of valuable resources, but it also serves as a source of inspiration for many of the groundbreaking engineering advancements of our time. Therefore, we are dedicated to being transparent about our company's current carbon footprint and the measures we are taking to support environmental conservation. By establishing and communicating our current impact, we can hold ourselves accountable and ensure that we continue to make progress in reducing our 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.
For our internal data storage, including emails, we use Google. We’re happy to share that Google remains committed to sustainability, and has plans to wholly operate on carbon-free energy by 2030. With their continued implementation of green energy, we look forward to using Google’s tools.
As Covid-19 made its way into the United States, our company decided to move out of our office. After four 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.
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. In addition, our sales representatives who travel to attend conferences are selected based on their proximity to these and other events.
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.
In last year’s report, we made a commitment to reduce our commercial website’s carbon emissions. Today, we’re proud to announce that our efforts were successful, resulting in a 54% decrease in website carbon emissions!
Using WebsiteCarbon.com, we were able to calculate that our website produces roughly 75 kgs (~165 lbs) of carbon dioxide annually. Compared to last year’s estimate of 165.2 kg (364.1 lbs) of CO2, we’ve made quite an improvement! Our work isn’t finished, however. We plan to continue actively working on optimizing and improving the efficiency of this site. We hope that by next year, we’ll see an additional 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 urban forests, biodiversity hotspots, and fire-affected forests 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.
.png)
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.
