Hello all!
Cut the Mustard is a proud member of the SME Climate Hub, a global initiative that empowers small to medium sized companies to take climate action and build more resilient businesses. Through the SME Climate Hub, we commit to lowering our impact on the environment through authentic action, halving our emissions by 2030. In making the commitment, we have joined the United Nations Race to Zero campaign.
Some exciting news - Cut the Mustard has signed up for the SME Climate Hub and made a pledge to be NET Zero by the year 2030. Exciting news aside, let's look at what that means, how it will work, and the steps we'll need to take.
We've pledged that by the year 2030, we'll hit Net Zero, reducing our carbon emitions to, well, zero. 2030 (and the pledge's wider goal of 2050) might seem a world away, but the commitment is a realistic and achievable deadline to reduce our output and help make the world a greener place.
First of all, if you've been following our work, it's obvious to see why this is important to us. Over the years, we've worked with a number of positive causes, from charities to NGOs to companies looking to make the world a better place. Most commonly that's taken the form of nature, wildlife and climate change films, from Surrey Wildlife Trust to MIT to Goodwings Hotels. They've been some of our most satisfying clients to work with (not to mention, some of our best work), and we owe it ourselves, our clients and the rest of the world to practice what we preach, and represent the same ideals at the stories we tell.
Unlike other companies that manufacture, produce or sell physical products, we create an entirely digital product, thus making it quite a bit easier for us to be able to track, calculate and reduce our footprint. Our size and business model already makes us greener than most UK companies, but there will still be some work to do. Firstly, as we exist in a communal office building, it's not exactly easy to track how much energy, heating and internet usage we use, but our building managers are currently taking steps towards making it a greener place, as well as being able to calculate and track our physical usage office-by-office. They began with the replacement of the heating and air conditioning system last year, and we continue to stay in dialogue with them over how we can best reach our goal. Either way, we won't stay at Fuel Studios forever, so when we move onto a bigger space, a consideration in the move will be how best we can monitor and control our gas and electricity output, and if we have a say in how that office generates it's electricity.
Our next step is reducing the digital footprint of our website - with this site ever increasing, we need to stay mindful of the energy consumtion it produces. There's providers and schemes available to combat website usage that we'll be looking into and working out a way to prevent or offset our usage.
On the more trivial end of things - Cut the Mustard does a heavy amount of recycling, and doesn't utilise any real work-related waste. Other than our 48-lock-in (which we've kept the work for a collection) we don't work on paper at all, and very next to no office supplies. And just for fun, most of the team are vegan or veggie, so you can tell where our love for the enviroment stems from!
We'll be posting more about this, hopefully with some trackable numbers as we work towards our comitment. Keep in loop!