Everyone at Rocket Badges is continuously exploring ways to reduce waste within our offices and to offer environmentally friendly alternatives to our most popular products. These efforts contribute to the protection of our earth as well as the continual improvement of sustainability practises. However, this effort must be shared amongst individual households, communities, businesses, and charitable organisations, all the way to officials and institutions. Rocket Badges works to minimise the negative impact we have on earth, while providing brands with fantastic products and badges.
A recent United Nations report warned that it is vitally important to limit global warming and avert further catastrophe, stating that it is “now or never”. Therefore, we’re exceptionally excited and honoured to announce Climate Positive Accreditation from Earthly. Earthly is a leading global movement which is aiming to work with progressive businesses to remove carbon and reverse the catastrophic effects of climate change. An organisation or business must achieve this certification as a true climate leader by calculating its current carbon footprint, identifying solutions to minimise these emissions, and remove at least 10% of their footprint which equates to around 110% on a total scale.
An accreditation such as Climate Positive does not happen overnight, and it is not an easy victory. Nonetheless, it is a massive and extremely positive step in the right direction.
In that spirit, we’d like to share a little more about our Climate Positive journey, so that other progressive businesses can join us in this movement.
Why We’re Taking the Steps to Reduce our Business Footprint
By providing eco-friendly options for our most popular products and reducing waste within offices are examples of how Rocket Badge is continually working to make a positive impact on the planet. In addition to protecting our planet and reducing our carbon footprint, we also support and partner with brands that support the environment. Therefore, we strive to cut out carbon footprint as much as possible, as well as becoming a climate positive company.
We understand that this certification is only the beginning. To make our planet a better place, we must continue this vital work. It takes continual improvement and an immense amount of effort for businesses and organisations to become a true climate leader. As a forward thinking organisation, we are proud to be taking this initial proactive step towards reducing our carbon footprint. Despite this pride and excitement, we understand that there is still a lot of work to be done. We now offset 110% of our carbon footprint. By preserving the earth’s limited resources, we will be actively slowing down global warming.
How We’re Becoming a Climate Positive Business
Our carbon footprint was calculated through three areas of our business to obtain the Climate Positive Certification:
- Direct emissions from sources that are owned or controlled by our company (e.g., workspace emissions, heating)
- Indirect emissions from purchased sources of energy that our company does not control (e.g., electricity)
- All other indirect emissions (e.g., procurement or freight)
We discovered that our general (t) CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent, or the universal unit of measurement to indicate the global warming potential of Greenhouse Gases) to be: 63.33 t CO2e. This breaks down to 2.26 t CO2e per employee or 0.05 t CO2e per square metre in our building.
However, that’s simply numbers. We also worked with Earthly to distinguish a number of potential reductions that we can make to further decrease these greenhouse gases. As well as taking several steps to reduce our carbon footprint, we’re also offsetting 110% of our emissions by investing in nature-based projects which have a goal of removing carbon and reversing climate change. Read below to find out more about these projects:
- Brazil Nut Concessions in Madre de Dios: This project focuses on rainforest conservation in Peru to reduce deforestation in over 300,000 hectares of the Peruvian Amazon through a sustainable market for forest Brazil nuts. The goal is to stop deforestation and support the livelihood of 400 families.
- Mangrove Planting in Madagascar: This project run by Eden Reforestation Projects focuses on reforestation and poverty in the mangroves, which aid tremendously in carbon sequestration; mangroves also provide critical storm surge protection and vital habitats for many species. To date, the Madagascar project has planted over 300 million trees and created over 3 million workdays.
- Kasigau Dryland Protection: The Kasigau Corridor project protects an expanse of over 200,000 hectares of dryland Acacia-Commiphora forest home to over 2,000 elephants. The project has led to 13,936,339 t CO2e avoided to date and has created a market-driven solution to wildlife conservation through a community-led, community-based, sustainable model.
Taking Action to Protect the Planet
At Rocket Badge, we are lucky to have the opportunity to partner with incredible and progressive brands who strive to support their local communities. The team at Rocket badge also strives to go above and beyond to tackle environmental catastrophes and climate change.
We recognise that the Climate Positive certification is only a first step to help transform our impact on the world.
Due to our recognition of the fact that the Climate Positive certification is only the first step, we have taken it upon ourselves to develop a sustainability roadmap. This roadmap will highlight the steps we need to follow to become a more sustainable and conscious company. Initially, this means we will ensure our customers have a wider variety of eco-friendly and sustainable products to choose from, as well as giving customers more information on how each product positively impacts our earth.
On top of this, we want to ensure our customers are aware of our company’s ethics and our enviromental impact. Therefore, we have made the decision to publish a series of policies and documentation. We are currently drafting a report which will detail our company’s goals in-depth, as well as following our progress when attempting to reach our goals.
After this report is published, we then have plans to publish eco-credentials of every product on our website, which will lead into our planned offsetting scheme.
This will take continual evolution, discussion and improvement, and we are up to the challenge,like many of our partnered businesses. So, please join us in our effort to fight climate change and bring sustainability to the forefront of our business.
We’d love to share even more. Please reach out any time to learn more about our Climate Positive journey or to share your own efforts to keep Earth inhabitable. We’re all on this planet and in this together.