VERDN and EMPOWER redefine the meaning of sustainability, transparency and real impact for SHOPIFY
MAY 15 2021
LONDON, UK and OSLO, Norway // VERDN and EMPOWER join forces to enable any SHOPIFY user to clean plastic waste up and kick-start waste management around the world, closing the loop while creating jobs where needed the most.
Brought together by the passion of using technology to solve the world’s major challenges, Verdn and Empower have been working together over the last year to build the optimal platform for measurable impact on the plastic waste problem.
Verdn’s API and Shopify plug-in makes it effortless for stores to embed plastic-cleanup pledges to the products they already sell. For example, every t-shirt sold by a brand could pledge to recover 1 kg of ocean-bound plastic. Post-purchase, each end-customer gets to track their pledge on a live dashboard. The click-through rate to these dashboards is 10x normal marketing email, making them a potent tool for customer engagement, and revealing the population’s latent interest in these important issues.
So far the newly launched solution has been growing with 30 % month-on-month and Empower and Verdn aim to reach demand of at least 100 tonnes of plastic per month by the end of 2021 — letting us truly have a substantial and traceable impact on both people and the environment!
The use of the Empower platform ensures cost-efficient collection of plastic waste, sorting at source, local jobs both for waste pickers and in waste management facilities. Importantly it is all done under local ownership, creating job opportunities, entrepreneurs, value creation and assets. By providing local entrepreneurs the ownership, tools and platform to grow, we optimise not only the environmental but also the social and economic impact on the ground.
To gain 100 % impact on the ground, 0 % of the donations goes to Empower. Empower and Verdn facilitate and document the impact, while covering the costs to support maximum impact. Empower makes sure the donation goes directly where it should go — and provides the blockchain secured proof and trust.
“We want real impact. Action that improves the life of people everywhere, also on the ground. We believe in kickstarting waste management infrastructure everywhere. With the support of innovative partners like Verdn, we can really help to close the tap faster in more areas, while also creating jobs for people that need it the most.” explains Wilhelm Myrer, CEO & Founder of Empower.
“We believe that the radical transparency offered by our solution sets a new benchmark for sustainability initiatives. Companies can see where their giving pledges go, end-customers can hold the company accountable, and everyone is informed and educated on the massive problem of plastic waste and its implications for peoples all over the world.” says Christopher Mjelde, CEO and co-founder of Verdn.
About Verdn
VERDN is a London-based software company developing ‘sustainability-as-a-service’. Verdn’s mission is to make sustainability valuable for companies — first by making green initiatives a tool of customer engagement, and later by monetising them for increased company revenues. Verdn’s Shopify app won 2nd place in their most recent App Challenge, and it was featured as a staff pick on the Shopify App Store in early 2021.
For more information about Verdn, visit verdn.com, or follow @verdn.impact on Instagram.
About Empower
EMPOWER, a Norwegian circular platform company, uses digitisation, cloud-data and blockchain technology to facilitate a circular economy. Empower’s mission is to ensure that all materials have a value and can be tracked from production, to new resources and back into new sustainable products again, with a vision to close the tap on plastic waste and recreate a world without waste.
For more information about Empower, visit Empower.eco, follow @empowerplastic on Twitter and Instagram and find us on Facebook.
Click here to watch the BBC video about Empower.
Media Contacts
Christopher Mjelde, Verdn, chris@verdn.com , press@verdn.com , +447531616715
Wilhelm Myrer, Empower, wilhelm@empower.eco, media@empower.eco
