Emission Zero.
The world is better when people, ideas, and money move freely.
At Wise, we believe:
But if we don't have a world in the first place, we can forget everything else. So as a company — and as people — we can't ignore climate change.
We're taking responsibility for the impact we have on the planet, and we'd like to share what we're doing to become a more sustainable business.
The actions we detail below are just the first steps we're taking as we formulate a longer-term plan. We wanted to share what we're doing so far to help educate folks about the climate emergency, and show how companies can reduce their carbon footprint.
We welcome feedback on how we can do even better.
The climate emergency.
By burning the fossil fuels to power much of our modern world, we're pumping excessive amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
This is making our climate more unstable, and raising the Earth's temperature. If we don't reverse these trends, the consequences to our only home will be profound.
To prevent the worst, climate scientists estimate we must bring carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.
We think that's too slow, so we're committed to being net zero by 2030.
How do we get there?
Reduce.
We're reducing our carbon emissions as much as possible.
Offset.
Finally, we’re offsetting what we can’t reduce.
- Measure.
To measure Wise's carbon footprint, we had to figure out which company actions cause carbon emissions, and how much each action is responsible for.
We looked at the following:
- Purchases: From food to Facebook ads
- Cloud: Our servers, which keep Wise running
- Travel: Including flights, hotels and taxis
- Capital Goods: Building or expanding our offices
- Commuting: How we get to our offices
- Buildings: The energy to keep our offices running
- Products: The energy to produce our debit cards
- Employees: The energy to support remote working
12,542 tCO2e
When we calculated our carbon footprint for 2020, we got:
or tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. That's equivalent to a person flying roundtrip between JFK and Heathrow 10,982 times (yikes).
- Reduce.
We believe we can reduce our emissions by 75% by 2030.
To do that, we'll work with suppliers to reduce emissions from purchases; move to a zero carbon cloud; make sure new offices are built with low-carbon materials; and use clean power.
Here's what we're already doing:
- We've switched to clean power in our Tallinn office.
- We bought Renewable Energy Certificates for our Tampa and New York offices, and we're in the process of buying them for our offices where clean power isn't available.
- We used sustainable materials for our London office expansions — like our new phone booths, made from 1,088 recycled plastic bottles!
- We're reviewing our cloud architecture, to see how we can make our cloud usage more efficient.
We started taking these steps in Q1 2021, so the impact will be seen in our next footprint calculation, later this year.
Emission Zero.
2019
We started measuring our carbon footprint. It was 16,313 tCO2e
2020
Our carbon footprint was 12,542 tCO2e
We started offsetting all of our carbon emissions and became Carbon Neutral!
2021
In January, we switched to clean power in our Tallinn office
We bought Renewable Energy Certificates for all offices
We're using sustainable materials for our office expansions (like phone booths made of 1,088 recycled plastic bottles)