[ECO]We All Have the Power to Be the Change

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We all have the power to be the change

I spent my whole career as a marketeer and feel incredibly fortunate that work has never really felt like work. I cut my teeth as a graduate at Disney, before going agency-side, and then founded my own marketing agency group called PrettyGreen after a certain client gave me “wings.” I worked with amazing brands such as Nando’s, Under Armour, Cadbury, and John Lewis, to name but a few. Although immensely fulfilled, I was growing a little restless and was in search of a higher purpose.

In July 2019, an old client of mine, Greg Gormley, reconnected with me following a near-fatal motorbike accident. He sent me a note:

“Keep meaning to buzz you to get together. Hope all is well. So next week at 9 pm, Channel 4, 24 Hours @A&E. My TV debut.”

Quite the reconnection message.

During his stay in the hospital, he vowed to create something with purpose. He’d previously worked at News Corp, scaled businesses, floated them, and before his accident, he founded a £100m tech business, which I’d helped him launch. Maybe it was serendipity, but we were both looking to give something back.

We met up for drinks that turned into dinner as he discussed an idea he had around social mobility and tree planting with the idea of connecting people who drive with people who need lifts, helping people and the planet. Over the coming days and weeks, we spoke a lot, and Greg asked if I’d be interested in becoming a co-founder. I spoke to my board at PrettyGreen, who agreed it was a great idea.

So we embarked on a mission together, using his financial and tech background and my marketing skills. With “long” COVID, the business needed to evolve from an Uber for friends to an errands app during lockdown, to a B2B travel app helping get people back to the office, and now to being a climate business with a simple mission to empower businesses to be climate-conscious.

With a vision where everyone actively and consciously takes responsibility for their impact on Earth, we see ourselves as being a sustainability partner for climate-positive action.

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now a top 5% B-corp) uses its technology systems to help knit together businesses, communities, and sustainability ecosystems to create a positive impact on the planet. This easily enables a business to showcase the good that it’s doing: responsible tree planting, removing ocean plastic, and supporting verified carbon projects.

As your sustainability partner for climate-positive action, we offer a simple-to-use carbon footprint management solution for businesses and their customers. Our platform empowers businesses, individuals, and communities to achieve Net Zero targets by identifying, avoiding, and countering their emissions. Unlike many climate businesses, we take a bottom-up approach, trying to get everyone to take a little more responsibility for their emissions, effectively employing a “nudge theory” approach.

We focus 80% of our efforts on hospitality and leisure, working with hotels,

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, and businesses such as De Vere, Coventry Building Society Arena, Amazonico, Addison Lee, and Oracle. Food, hospitality, and dining out account for 20% of carbon emissions, with each three-course meal creating 8kg of CO2, and an overnight stay approximately 11.5kg per night. Food waste accounts for 6% of all emissions, which is double that of aviation. But people just don’t understand and believe that it’s everyone else’s responsibility and fault.

We’re trying to drive a green hospitality revolution with in-the-moment affordable solutions and showcase how easy it is to make a difference and make a positive impact on the world, one meal, one stay, one event at a time. Unlike a number of businesses in the climate space, we have a very strong view on carbon countering. The word “offset” has become a byword for greenwashing, and in many instances quite rightly so.

Supporting humanitarian carbon reduction and removal projects is fundamental in reversing climate change. We’ve funded the planting of over 1.5 million trees, recovered 135,000 pieces of ocean plastic, and countered over 200,000 tonnes of CO2e by funding carbon credits. The positive human impact of supporting these projects, outside of the positive CO2 impact, enables people to have long-term jobs, protect vulnerable habitats, and help rebuild communities.

It’s critical to drive down and avoid CO2, but for most businesses, there are only a few levers you can pull, especially in hospitality. Therefore, you are left with a huge carbon footprint that you cannot address, and actually have the opportunity to avoid addressing by purchasing offsets, which are deemed as bad. By leaning into the humanitarian benefits and the wider UN SDGs you can support, and by showcasing the traceability and transparency on how every meal plants a tree and supports a humanitarian carbon project via Gold Standard, you can see in real-time the positive impact via an Impact Profile. This helps close the gap and helps people understand the positive impact our simple actions make.

The truth is these projects help with equality, ******** reduction, clean water, etc., and the main reason we are all focused on reversing climate change is for humanity. We’re proud to have created over 15,000 employment days around the world. The transparency of showcasing their sustainability journey fosters stronger customer connections, driving positive engagement, and empowering them to take more responsibility for their carbon footprint.

We believe in the mindset of “one is better than none.” To help people embrace the mindset of starting their journey, like “couch to 5km.” The top-down approach targeting governments and petrochemical companies is critical, but it can make businesses and individuals feel impotent, and feel that the problem is too big, or that it’s not their ****** or problem.

The focus on 1.5 degrees and us controlling that is wrong. Most of us can’t control the temperature of our office or house, so the idea that any of us can actually control the temperature of the world is just too big. We all need to focus on finding ways to bridge the gap between intention and action by offering practical, user-friendly solutions. Our focus is on providing our real-time impact dashboards, which empower businesses to transparently showcase their efforts and progress to their stakeholders, creating a positive feedback loop that fuels continuous improvement.

Our growing community of eco-champions inspires a movement where every business can be a force for positive environmental change. If that sounds like something that appeals to you, we’d love to hear from you.

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