We Are Systematic is carbon neutral and on the path to net zero, having purchased 100% permanent carbon removal for our 2021 footprint.
Overview stats
Total footprint: 53 tonnes
Tonnes removed: 53 tonnes
Removal types: Biochar
Reduction plans: Engaging consultants and suppliers, Formalising hardware policy, Monitoring business travel
We at WAS did this because, frankly, it’s the right thing to do. We’re a new company but we believe strongly in starting-up as we mean to go on, rather than making a mess now for someone else to clear up later. One of our core values is to ‘leave it better than you found it’ and that applies to the planet as much as our design work.
We’re hoping to see more companies like us (small, remote, tech first) do the same because we don’t really have an excuse not to. We’re also excited to join Tech Zero and 1% for the Planet communities of companies to learn and share as we progress to our ultimate target of net-negative by 2030.
The problem we faced
In early 2022, we were acutely aware of our carbon footprint but had no idea how to address it: what that would entail, where to start, and how much this would cost us. Averting climate disaster is an important topic to each of us individually, but we realised we had a blind spot when it came to our company.
The lightbulb moment went something like this:
“A potential client has asked if we have a sustainability policy”
“Erm… no… because…. Er… actually why don’t we have a sustainability policy?”
To our credit, we started putting this right straight away. Within a week we had drafted and published a sustainability policy, joined Tech Zero and 1% for the Planet and signed the SME Climate Commitment.
Our carbon footprint was still a challenge. We initially tried to calculate this ourselves using a spreadsheet and a couple of free online calculators. But the results always seemed unconvincing. We weren’t confident existing models were designed with our kind of remote and tech-based company in mind. We didn’t have an office or company cars. The majority of our computing is done on servers half the world away.
We came across climate software company Supercritical through our new network as a member of Tech Zero and chose to work with them after evaluating a couple of alternatives. They seemed to ‘get us’ both in our company setup (difficult to footprint as explained above) and in our desire to go beyond the usual vague greenwashy commitments to tree planting and do something really robust and impactful.
Solution
1. Footprinting
With a name like We Are Systematic you can imagine we’re fond of process. So we were happy to see Supercritical outline a smooth and streamlined footprinting methodology for us. Supercritical rigorously analysed our data, providing an in-depth breakdown of our emissions and detailed reduction recommendations for how to reduce these going forward.
2. Removals
For our removal response, we invested in biochar. Biochar is a charcoal-like substance produced by pyrolysis of biomass (organic material from agricultural and forestry waste), which generates a very stable form of carbon which can then be spread on soil. This is a safe, mature and durable way of storing carbon today, as confirmed by the IPCC, and is a great method of removing carbon immediately. Supercritical rigorously vets and monitors suppliers so that we can have complete confidence in the positive climate impact and absence of negative side-effects from this carbon removal method.
We decided to invest in biochar for two reasons:
- It’s a permanent carbon removal solution, so it meets the criteria we had for meaningful impact. This isn’t conventional/avoidance offsetting, it’s removing carbon directly from the atmosphere equivalent to our emissions.
- Biochar is, at this stage, one of the more affordable options. Our ambitions are big, but we’re ultimately still a small business and financial realities mean investing in more ambitious technologies like direct air capture has to remain an ambition for the time being.
3. Reductions
We’re investigating the following reductions
- Engaging employees, consultants and suppliers to help reduce remote working emissions
- Formalising a hardware policy that chooses refurbished and remanufactured equipment, with new items being a last option.
- Monitoring business travel and prioritising low carbon options wherever possible
Why this is important
Purchasing high-quality, permanent removal is impactful for two major reasons:
1. We are literally removing the carbon we’ve emitted so it stops heating the atmosphere.
This is very different, and far better for the climate than conventional, avoidance offsets! A recent IPCC report (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN’s international body of scientists working on climate change) reiterated the urgent need for both reduction and removal in order to hit the targets outlined in the Paris agreement.
Removal offsets are typically ~10x the price of conventional offsets, for good reason: conventional offsets involve paying someone else not to emit carbon (but your emissions remain in the atmosphere), whereas removal offsets directly remove your carbon emissions from the atmosphere, meaning you reach a state of net zero emissions.
2. We are contributing to the vital scaling of the carbon removal market.
This market needs to scale radically, soon: we need to remove 10 billion tonnes annually by 2050. That’s 39% CAGR year on year and 20,000x growth from here.
In order to stay below 1.5°C we need to annually remove an estimated 10 billion tonnes of CO2e by 2050: to date, 500,000 tonnes of carbon have been removed. We wanted to contribute to this growth — sending a demand signal to carbon removal suppliers is the fastest way to help carbon removal scale.
As such, we are proud to be setting the standard for best in class climate action. Net zero isn’t going to happen unless we all act, and smaller businesses have a natural advantage. We can move faster and be more radical. Change happens slower and costs more the bigger you get, so the sooner we all make changes the bigger the impact for people, business and planet down the road.
Future plans and goals
We’ve set out a roadmap to be a carbon-negative company by 2030. We’ll do this in three stages:
- Carbon neutral from 2021: permanently remove as much from the atmosphere as we emit, begin reduction efforts
- Lifetime net zero from 2025: reduce our emissions as far as possible and remove all the carbon we’ve ever emitted as a company (also known as historical net zero)
- Life time net zero and carbon negative by 2030: once we’ve removed everything we’ve ever emitted, for each year going forward we want to proactively remove more carbon from the atmosphere than we emit to become a genuinely positive-impact company
You can keep track of our progress and read more about our sustainability commitments here.
