Why is this important to us?
Technology is often written off as inherently ‘green’ by its nature. Well it just so happens that technology solutions and IT infrastructure contribute as much carbon as the global airline industry, so it most certainly has a cost. Valtira is a relatively small company, but we want to do what we can to help our company run more sustainably and also offer what we’ve learned to our clients to help their businesses be more sustainable as well.
The peatlands can store 20x more carbon than typical forests
This year’s carbon offset project
This year we chose the Central Kalimantan Peatlands as our project to sponsor. The peatlands can store 20x more carbon than typical forests and it was at risk for being turned into a palm oil production facility. In addition to the carbon storage of peatlands, it’s also a crucial habitat for orangutans.
Valtira carbon output and offsets for 2022
We analyzed our carbon footprint including direct and indirect metric tons (Mt) of CO2 emissions, determining the offset purchase needed to become carbon neutral.
Scope 1: Direct Emissions
0 Mt
Direct Emissions
Scope 2: Indirect Emissions – Owned
Purchased energy
46.5 Mt
(Office electricity, heating, & cooling)
Scope 3: Indirect Emissions – Not Owned
Upstream activities
15 Mt
Purchased goods and services – production related (dev cloud, offshore home offices, SaaS tools)
1 Mt
Purchased goods and services – non-production related (SaaS tools)
20 Mt
Fuel and energy related activities not captured above (home offices)
3 Mt
Capital goods (laptops, monitors, phones)
Downstream activities
2 Mt
Use of sold products (cloud hosting)
87 Mt
Total Emissions
-200 Mt
Purchased carbon offsets
-113 Mt
Net carbon footprint
How we’ve helped our clients
This year we’ve also helped many of our clients reduce their technology carbon footprint. Some solutions are simple, like automatically converting all images on a website to next-generation formats, while other reductions are planned as legacy applications or infrastructure are being updated. Our goal is to first introduce the idea and then take meaningful steps to get there.
Our clients have also found an added bonus of reducing the footprint of their technology infrastructure, their sites are performing better than ever and they are achieving high performance scores from Google, increasing their sites’ reach.
Internally, we’ve set up automated performance monitoring for our clients that will alert us if a site is not operating efficiently. We’ve also started successful employee programs that offer bonuses for usage of green energy, electric cars and efficient home utilities for our remote workers.
As with any large effort or commitment, we’ve still got a long way to go and improvements to be made but we’ve made a lot of progress in the last year and learned a lot of techniques that can help the urgent need of reducing carbon emissions on our planet.
If you’re curious about what we’ve learned and how it may help reduce your technology infrastructure’s carbon footprint please reach out to learn more about how we can help.