Netmatters Is Carbon Neutral!

As a business, Netmatters pledged that 2021 would be the year that we became carbon neutral.

Over the last few years we have been making big strides to reduce the amount of carbon that we produce as a business, but we wanted to go further and take the next steps to offset the carbon that we were producing.

We are thrilled to announce that our efforts have paid off, and we are now operating as a carbon neutral business – meeting our goal in just the second month of the year.

"We recognise that as a business we must take our environmental impact very seriously. The team has worked hard to get us to this position, which we consider to be the first step in a plan of continuous improvement" - James Gulliver, Managing Director.

Reducing our carbon output

We have worked hard to reduce the amount of carbon our business produces – on average we now produce around 40 tonnes of carbon per year. Previously this was over 80 tonnes a year.

We’ve made some big, and some smaller changes to help us to do this, including:

• Changing all of our lights to LED lights in the offices
• Introducing power-saving hardware at every opportunity
• Recycling initiatives
• Operating a paperless office
• Changing over to electric vehicles where possible
• Using green electricity suppliers

Working to offset our carbon production

As well as doing what we can to reduce our carbon output, we’ve been taking steps to offset as much as possible, including a local tree-planting project here in Norfolk.

We wanted to do more though, and have recently signed up with the Ecologi programme. Ecologi empowers businesses and individuals to take positive action on climate change. Through them we have begun to invest in projects that are actively making a positive impact – you can see our project here: https://ecologi.com/netmatterslimited including a visual representation of the 250 trees planted on our behalf to date, as far afield as Mozambique and Madagascar!

By making this investment on a monthly basis, alongside our other activities we are currently able to offset just over 17.6 tonnes of carbon a month, meaning that not only are we offsetting our annual production (and therefore are carbon neutral!) we are now going some way to repay our carbon debt from previous years.

In real terms, the amount of carbon that we are able to offset on a monthly basis is the equivalent of 14 long-haul flights, 43,814 miles in a car or saving 53 square metres of sea ice. 

We’re just getting started

We are actively looking for new ways to help reduce our carbon footprint and offset more. We have a lot planned in 2021, not least by forming a Green Team internally to empower our staff to take responsibility alongside the management team.

Other projects in the pipeline for us include solar panels, upgrading our vans to electric vans and ramping up our recycling process too.

What is all the fuss about carbon neutrality?

The amount of carbon being produced around the world is one of the biggest contributing factors to climate change. As businesses, there are steps that we can take to make up for, or offset the carbon that we create, to help slow the pace of climate change globally.

It is our responsibility to do what we can to offset our carbon production and protect the world for future generations. By becoming carbon neutral we are able to reduce the impact that our business has on the environment and make sure we are doing our bit.

It is the responsibility of every business to take positive action to help protect the planet for future generations, and we’re proud to be able to do our part. If you want to find out more about the Ecologi programme visit their website here: https://ecologi.com/. We can all work together to slow climate change.