How (and why) Daye reached carbon neutrality
In the midst of one of the world’s biggest health and economic crises, we’re proud to announce that our commitment to sustainability remains unshaken, and we are now a CO2 neutral organisation.
We’re reaching carbon neutrality by supporting reforestation projects — in other words, we’ve helped plant enough trees to offset the carbon footprint of our production, deliveries, packaging, travel and office operations!
“Leave an impact, not a trace” is one of our core values at Daye, so from day 1 we knew that weaving sustainability into the fabric of the organisation is our only chance of credibly delivering on our mission statement.
Why become CO2 neutral?
Everything in early stage startups is a careful negotiation between surviving, following through on your mission, and doing so in line with your core values.
Sustainability is easy to neglect — it may have become a buzzword but it doesn’t bring tangible short-term value to your stakeholders. But cutting on sustainability early on means your organisation will have to pay to reintroduce environmentally-friendly measures in the future (and with a hefty interest fee).
A lot of my early fundraising conversations went array because I was too insistent on the importance of sustainability from a values perspective. I had to learn to justify our investment in sustainability with the same vigour and calculation as our investments in machines or marketing. Below is the argument we made to stakeholders in favour of carbon offsetting.
CO2 neutrality is an excellent half-way point between having a perfect sustainability score and not stifling your business with environmental perfectionism too early on. It took us about three months to calculate the exact CO2 impact our organisation had. In the process, we identified room for improvement in our products’ lifecycle, but we didn’t go as far as conducting a $100, 6–12 month long, full product life cycle assessment .
Where to start
We started by identifying a credible partner to help us be as precise as possible in calculating our CO2 footprint.
In our case, this partner was Pachama, a California-based team of scientists, environmentalists and engineers. Their framework for calculating the CO2 generated by an organisation was the most exhaustive one we could find.
Pachama helped us neutralise the CO2 impact of our employees’ commutes and our community events, in addition to the more obvious air travel, product deliveries, production and supply chain.
How
Pachama’s team of dedicated scientists and engineers have built a technology that uses machine learning and satellite monitoring, to ensure the companies offsetting their carbon footprint can monitor the re-growth of the forests they invest in.
Although we aim to minimise our emissions throughout our supply chain, we believe that capturing carbon from the atmosphere through sustainable and transparent reforestation is a very effective way to fight climate change.
We are reminded of the importance of rapid decarbonisation in these times of economic slowdown, as the global reduction in carbon emissions anticipated for 2020 barely amounts to the reduction needed yearly for the next decade if we are to remain below the 1.5°C threshold relative to pre-industrial levels.
Maintenance
We now keep an excel sheet of the areas we need to offset and make sure it’s up to date with team, product, supply chain and facilities changes.
We also receive updates on how our donations to planting trees are being utilised and how we can support the charities doing the legwork for us.
Building on top of CO2 neutrality
We think of achieving CO2 neutrality as just step 1 on a never-ending sustainability journey. Some of our next steps include:
- Getting our key suppliers to offset their CO2 emissions.
- Replacing our sugarcane applicators with a fully compostable, wood pulp-based material.
- Replacing our compostable wrappers with water-soluble ones.
- Replacing our compostable tampon refill pouch with a one-off delivery of an organic cotton pouch.
- Conducting a full life cycle assessment of our hero product, the tampon.
- Removing non-compostable plastic from our supply chain, in turn reducing ocean microplastic pollution.
- Continuously improving the design of period care products until their plastic-based alternatives become obsolete
Lastly, we’d like to thank our consumers for voting with their tampon subscription and choosing to support our sustainability efforts.
We couldn’t ask for better partners on this journey than you!
—Valentina Milanova, Founder & CEO, and John Bertolaso, Senior Design Engineer
