Meet Ecologi — the brilliant social enterprise helping Moving Brands stay climate positive
At Moving Brands, we’re keen to ensure we always honour commitments. One of those commitments is to do everything we can to combat climate change and protect our planet. Here, our copy lead Bede MacGowan looks at the brilliant work of our partners at Ecologi who are helping us — and others like us — do our bit to create a more sustainable future by getting climate positive.
Taking climate action
Founded by three friends from Bristol, UK, Ecologi puts “climate action at your fingertips”. It helps businesses compensate for carbon footprints by funding an array of international climate projects and planting trees (over 47 million so far).
Moving Brands signed up just over a year ago. Our global financial controller Phil Richardson chanced upon the scheme while sourcing houseplants to send the team to mark a year of working from home due to Covid. He came across a cool company called Pointless Plants that works with Ecologi to plant five trees for every order they receive.
“We’ve always measured our carbon footprint and had a goal of being carbon neutral by the end of 2021, so Ecologi made perfect sense,” says Phil.
“It’s amazing to think we’ve already had almost 17,000 trees planted, not to mention all the other great climate projects we’re supporting around the world.”
Supporting carbon reduction projects worldwide
The projects Phil refers to include one preventing deforestation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, another using waste biomass to produce electricity in Chile, and a third producing energy from waste rice husks in India.
We’re supporting the restoration and conservation of peatland in Indonesia, the production of renewable wind energy in Bulgaria, and the protection of the Amazonian ecosystem in Peru. And there are many more — you can see all the others on our dedicated Ecologi page.
It works through monthly payments that help fund tree planting globally in collaboration with The Eden Reforestation Projects and other certified projects that remove greenhouse gases.
That offsets the entire Moving Brands team’s carbon footprint, personal and professional, including emissions from their home, travel, holidays, food, hobbies and more.
To calculate the footprint, Ecologi combines World Bank data on average per capita emissions in employees’ country of residence with imported emissions data from the Global Carbon Project before adding 10% to ensure they’re becoming climate positive.
In total, I discovered, we’ve already supported 28 great projects worldwide that have offset more than 1,200 tonnes of CO2e — ensuring we remove more greenhouse gases than we put in.
Living by our principles
As a further thoughtful option, you can also sponsor individual ‘local’ tree planting in the UK, and they provide an image of ‘your actual tree’. Some day, maybe we’ll take a staff trip to check them all out.
To sum up, Ecologi offers an engaging — and simple — way for businesses to ensure they have a climate-positive workforce.
And more than that, there’s a feel-good factor for the team as well, to know we’re doing our bit, however small, to collectively tackle climate change, or at least that overall, we’re not making things worse.
It’s also paramount for us as a company to know we are genuinely living by our mission to do all we can to design for life, create for wellness, and do work that moves the world towards a more sustainable future.
Inspired by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, this involves partnering with like-minded companies who share our desire to create a better future through life-centred design and innovation.
“We assess the impact potential partners and clients have on the world before agreeing to work with them,” says Phil.
As well as working with Ecologi, Moving Brands has taken other decisive steps towards sustainability, including reviewing all our purchases and suppliers — from fruits to finance. We assess every product we buy or service we use against a scorecard that rates what they contain, where they come from and how they are transported to ensure they match our environmental values.
On a personal note, being part of a company that takes climate change and sustainability seriously doesn’t just put a smile on my face, it’s inspired me to take more steps to make a positive impact in my own life. It feels like, together, we really can make a difference.
If your company would like to get involved with Ecologi, find out more here.
Moving Brands’ last 18 months of climate impact with Ecologi:
16,913 trees planted
1,240.79 tonnes of CO2e offset
28 climate projects supported
