Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Celebrating Earth Day 2021 · 2021-04-21 16:59 by Susie Concannon

If you’ve spent time online these past days, you may have heard about Earth Day, an annual event that brings people around the world together in support of the environment. Find out more about the Earth Day actions that take place today.

This year’s Earth Day (April 22) motto is climate action, and eyeo, the company behind the Adblock Plus product, is also striving to become more sustainable and keep this earth a livable place not only on Earth Day but 365 days in the year. That’s why in 2019 we decided to found a Climate Protection task force that is responsible for analyzing our processes and behaviours, and see how much CO2 we produce and how we can reduce it.

One trait of our company’s DNA and culture is being a remote company. This means that, when working in an office was still possible, around 45% of eyeo’s employees worked from home full-time and didn’t commute to an office. The percentage is even higher for the team behind Adblock Plus! This has had a very positive impact on our CO2 footprint, but it comes with the need for occasional business trips and team days in order to stay in touch, and often flights are needed to bring our teams together.

To cut down on carbon emissions, we’ve adopted a new travel policy back in 2019, that discourages flights within Germany and to destinations that are reachable via train within less than 6 hours. Overall, we decided our meetings should only be held when absolutely necessary, and they should be held in locations that require the least travel. Of course, not travelling at all is still the most sustainable option, so we’ve been putting more emphasis on remote-friendly workshops and off-sites.

The company’s Climate Protection task force team also pushed for a more sustainable procurement policy. At eyeo we’re now very conscious about all the products and services we buy. Our data centers should run on green energy, our food must come from regional and sustainable providers and we try to prevent waste wherever we can.

In addition, we’ve recently decided to implement Stripe Climate in our transaction process so that a small percentage of contributions to Adblock Plus will be channelled to fund frontier carbon removal technologies. It’s a small step, and we have a long way to go but we want to see how creative we can get.

Behind the scenes, behind the product and the company, we’re also consumers. We luckily have choices today that we can make, depending on our individual situation, like using green energy, being more conscious about travelling, shopping local when possible, and more. If you need some inspiration for what you can do, here is a great list of ideas. We can all start with small and easy steps. And if we’re lucky they will grow into something bigger.

Let’s do this together!

Comment

Commenting is closed for this article.