April 22nd marks Earth Day 2023, 53 years after it started in 1970. At Sapio, our team is passionate about helping the planet and this year we finally have a way to quantify it!
How? Well, in January we launched onHand, an app that encourages and enables employees to do good, in whatever way suits them best. There’s so much to choose from: in person volunteering, phone calls, skills-based volunteering, donation banks (food, pet, hygiene etc) … The list goes on and on, but a big part of the app is the eco pledges: actions to help the environment. They can be small everyday things that we’re already doing without realising, such as using a reusable water bottle. They can also bigger things, as for example cutting out buying new clothes or changing to renewable energy.
It’s been nearly 4 months of our team using onHand, and as I write this, we have clocked up CO2e reductions of 7.14 tonnes and planted 290 trees via the onHand platform! On average, across the globe, a person’s footprint is 7 tonnes CO2e (according to Mike Berners Lee in his book “How Bad are Bananas?”). That means our team has collectively eliminated more than one person’s emissions in less than four months! The UK average is 13 tonnes, so we haven’t quite reduced the CO2e of one of ourselves, but it’s exciting to see what we can do in such a short period of time.
What’s next? We are planning to run a team CO2e competition tracking our results via onHand, to encourage even more eco pledges. On a business level, we are in the process of calculating our carbon footprint so that we can understand our impact better.
You can read more about our pledge to reach net zero by 2026 and see what other business’ net zero plans are here.

Figure 1 Our Sapio onHand dashboard, showing the trees planted and CO2e reduction

Figure 3 Growing our own vegetables, using a water butt and compost bin to make it as sustainable as possible



Figure 5 Swapping to vegetarian meals instead of meat more often
Figure 6 Cooking at home rather than eating out
