Verbal+Visual is Climate Neutral Certified
As the first sustainability-focused Shopify Plus agency, it’s important to us that we live our values and continuously improve our efforts to combat climate change. Our clients are industry leaders in retail, and we want to stand hand in hand with them to do our part in their fight against climate change.
With that, we here at Verbal+Visual are proud to announce that we’ve officially received our certification from the Climate Neutral Certification program, becoming the first e-commerce agency to achieve this certification!
With this certification comes a company-wide responsibility to offset our carbon footprint and take specific steps to reduce our footprint further. In this post, we’ve outlined why we decided to join Climate Neutral, how we measured our carbon footprint through Climate Neutral’s system, and what steps we are taking to reduce our environmental impact moving forward.
The Why
We have always strived to work with mission-driven brands and over the past year we've made great strides towards achieving a portfolio with 100% mission-driven brands. While this effort is ongoing and important, solely supporting these thoughtful brands is not nearly enough. We wanted to find a way to directly action to achieve a more sustainable and circular economy.
We believe that just as we encourage the brands we work with to become more sustainable, their service partners should participate through direct action. Just as we’ve seen e-commerce consumers gravitate towards mission-driven brands, we believe that B2B transactions will involve increasing standards and expectations from partners to be mission-driven as well. Our hope is that we can advance our goal of working with more mission-driven brands not simply by wishing for it to happen, but demonstrating our initiative in fighting for the same goals as our clients. We also hope to inspire clients that are still working on finding ways to incorporate sustainability into their operations, and guide discussions towards next steps for them.
The What
What exactly are we measuring and offsetting for? Carbon emissions come from our office space, employee commuting, business travel, and more. Basically, all of the emissions that result from running the company and providing services to our clients. We used Climate Neutral’s Brand Emissions Estimator (BEE) platform to reduce the time and expertise it requires to embark on a carbon footprinting. This allows for companies of any size to begin their carbon offsetting journey. It’s particularly important for smaller firms that do not have the time or resources to embark on a large scale measurement effort.
The BEE creates an estimate using basic company information and economic input / output data. Next, we refine that estimate using specific data from our business. It includes therms of natural gas, kilowatt-hours of electricity, kilograms of aluminum, airline miles, etc. This is an estimate, not Verbal+Visual’s precise carbon footprint. What you see below reflects average firm behavior by sector and country. All of these numbers are modeled — not measured. But that's ok - we can still learn a lot about the magnitude of our total responsibility and about where our hot spots are:
BEE Estimates
168 tCO2e Carbon footprint
168 tonnes of carbon equals:
36 cars on the road for a year
The annual energy use of 19 homes
Sequestration of 219 acres of forest in the U.S. in one year
Scope 1 - 2.9 tCO2e Scope 1 emissions are direct emissions under our company’s control, such as natural gas used to heat our office or diesel burned in fleet vehicles.
Scope 2 - 8.7 tCO2e Scope 2 emissions are indirect emissions from the generation of purchased energy. These are emissions created during the production of the energy and eventually consumed by our company.
Scope 3 - 156 tCO2e Scope 3 emissions are all other indirect emissions from our supply chain – these are the greatest share of carbon footprint, covering emissions associated with business travel, procurement, waste and more.
The How
The most important part of the certification process, and an ongoing effort will be not only to offset our footprint each year but come up with a meaningful reduction plan to reduce our carbon footprint in the future. Through Climate Neutral, we can purchase carbon credits to fund projects that drive climate change solutions. Projects include removing emissions from the atmosphere (e.g. reforestation), or avoiding emissions in the first place (e.g. water filtration). A common misconception, and a welcome learning lesson is that offsetting is quite affordable. It costs most companies just 0.4% of annual revenue to offset their entire footprint.
Offsetting
Our purchase of 168 carbon credits will go towards the following projects across the globe:
Cookstoves in Uganda
Energy efficiency in China
Electric vehicle charging in the U.S.
Wind energy in the U.S.
Landfill gas in multiple regions
We will update this page as Climate Neutral provides more information on each project.
Lastly, it’s important to keep in mind that carbon offsetting is a reactive solution to a problem that has already occurred and which there is no reversing. To keep global warming in check, we need to be proactive and cut emissions by 7.6 percent annually from 2020-2030. Verbal+Visual is committing to implement at least two reduction plans over the next 12-24 months to reduce our emissions, and will report on our progress next year. This plan will evolve over time as we implement new policies and adapt to what is working well and what we need to improve. You can see our reduction plan below and we’ll be sure to update you over the next 12-24 months.
Reducing
Commitment #1
We commit to reduce emissions from employee commuting by instituting a WFH policy.
We are going to extend and update our WFH policy by delaying our return to a physical office space and when we do move into a space, we will enact a WFH policy that is aimed at reducing our overall commuting footprint.
Commitment #2
We plan to reduce our overall office supply consumption by providing alternative solutions for print materials, changing the food supplies we order on a weekly basis, and composting and recycling in our office.
We will implement SOP's for when/how printing materials should be used. Will be a challenge for us since we are a design agency. We will explore other options like whiteboard walls in our office. Composting our food supplies and reducing plastic packaging.
Commitment #3
This is not an official commitment to Climate Neutral as it does not affect our company's direct emissions. We plan to help reduce the impact and involvement of client emissions. Our goal is to increase the percentage of client companies that have sustainability best practices and measures as part of their mission. Given that we work with e-commerce companies, we want to empower current clients and target future clients that are committed to sustainability.
For current clients: We will share and provide resources for organizations like Climate Neutral (many of our clients already participate) and facilitate introductions between client leadership teams to encourage participation in these organizations. We will also provide clients with green hosting options and e-commerce tech tools that help to reduce carbon footprint by limiting returns, providing sustainable packaging solutions, etc.
For future clients: Our Sales & Marketing team is going to focus on qualifying leads that are mission-driven and have or plan to implement sustainability measures. We will be deprioritizing brand outreach that does not meet our sustainability criteria and we have redesigned our website recently to make our focus on helping sustainable brands be one of the differentiating factors of our agency.
In summary, we plan to implement sustainability measures and policies to reduce the carbon footprint of our new office space and commuting workforce, thus doing our small part to combat climate change.
We are excited to begin this journey and we are grateful for the opportunity to be joining hundreds of forward-thinking companies that hold similar values. As we explored this option, the certification process seemed daunting and we had to question whether it was worth it for a boutique agency like ours to join this initiative now. What we hope to convey in this report is that it’s entirely feasible for a company of any size to take action, and we felt it to be imperative that as we build digital experiences for brands we believe in, that we also take action ourselves. We are fortunate to have a team that holds similar values when it comes to climate change and we know that the commitment we are making here will have an impact on our professional and personal lives.
Please reach out if you have any questions about the certification process. We’d love to talk about our experience and introduce you to the Climate Neutral team if you are interested.
