APX Earth Month: Sustainability should be spotlighted every day
For the entire month of April, APX will dedicate its social media channels to showcase and spotlight sustainability through our network.
Every year on April 22, Earth Day serves as a significant anniversary of the modern environmental movement. More than ever, it also serves as a reminder to all of us about a need for transformational change. With its 2021 theme, “Restore Our Earth,” it marks a moment to come together for action and insight sharing that must go beyond a daily focus and be an omnipresent, everyday concept to think about constantly. VCs, startups, all of us.
Introducing APX Earth Month. This year, we at APX will be dedicating more than the usual share of our time to showcase and spotlight sustainability. For the entire month of April, we are dedicating our social channels to inspiring humans, companies, and missions present in the APX network: startups, mentors, partners, and my colleagues.
As a kick-off, we will look at why sustainability is growing in importance in general and to us as early-stage investors and APX’s approach to creating a better, more sustainable world.
Why sustainability matters
With study after study highlighting the scale of anthropogenic impact on the environment, a pressing issue worldwide has been examining and re-evaluating human activity through the prism of sustainability.
According to research by a group of international scientists led by Stockholm Resilience Centre, four of nine planetary boundaries that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth’s system have been crossed as a result of human activity: global warming, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, and altered biogeochemical cycles. Faced with climate emergency and the sixth mass extinction of species, we — particularly those of us who live in the Global North — have no choice but to put the world on a sustainable trajectory.
Given the above challenges, it is no coincidence that the last few years have seen a tremendous focus on sustainability. But what do we mean when we talk about it? Sustainability is a broad and complex concept with multiple dimensions relating to environmental protection and social and economic objectives.
Sustainability at APX
At APX, we approach and manage sustainability holistically, taking care of all three dimensions: environment, society, economy. Economic sustainability and ecological sustainability are two essential pillars of our sustainability efforts. While the former is part of our core business and the reason we exist as a company, the latter relates to our responsibility as humans living on this planet- so far, it is the only one we have available.
Sustainability is one of APX’s core values. We are convinced that high and fast growth, profitability, and positive impact for people and the planet can go hand-in-hand.
That’s also why sustainability is one of APX’s core values. We are convinced that high and fast growth, profitability, and positive impact for people and the planet can go hand-in-hand. For startups to become successful, a focus on both impact and sustainability is not a nice-to-have but a need-to-do. It means something different to every startup, of course. Thus, APX offers resources, networks, and materials to its portfolio companies to be more sustainable.
For some of our portfolio companies, sustainability is at the core of their business model:
- UNOWN has new ideas on fashion, ownership, and the sharing economy and is growing all the time.
- PLAN3T makes understanding and offsetting your carbon footprint easy and playful.
- Chargetrip supports EV owners to charge their electric vehicles.
- Givetastic empowers employees to contribute to social and environmental projects of their choice.
- Bluedot offers a product that helps you operate, monetize and commercialize your EV-charging in 30 seconds.
- Fyppit allows residents to discover and buy locally available goods delivered to their doorsteps within 6 hours.
- Bonnet grants EV drivers access to every public charger.
And more and more of our portfolio companies embed sustainability within their business- and growth models.
As a company, we have been climate-neutral since our inception in 2018. We started by offsetting our emissions. Since 2019, we have been committed to continually minimizing our footprint together with Leaders for Climate Action. We have also built a new office in 2020 and applied several measures to reduce our climate impact. Check out my colleague Amelie’s post to learn more about how we made our office climate-neutral and how you can do the same with yours.
Moreover, we are fully committed to creating a “new normal” that involves more conscious travel, complete climate-neutrality, conscious energy consumption, employee engagement in climate action. And we are happy and proud partners of key players such as ClimatePartner and Leaders for Climate Action, whose work and impact make a difference. More on this over the month.
Sustainability and caring for our planet need to be in the spotlight every day. We hope you will join us in spotlighting sustainability during and beyond our APX Earth Month so together, we can empower more good-doer and change-makers for a more sustainable future.
