Walking the fine line

What you do, and how you talk about what you do can mean the difference between transparency and greenwashing—even if all of it is true.

If it eat a 1500 calorie pizza for lunch then immediately run 25kms (a roughly equivalent burn), those calories don’t just vanish and take me back down to zero—my body still needs to digest.

This is the unfortunate pitfall with buying offsets and declaring your organisation as carbon-neutral or carbon zero. The emissions still happen—the air still needs to ingest emissions for a great many years before they’re removed, if at all.

Impact Labs is far from perfect, but I think there’s power in admitting that. I’m pretty sure we’ll never be perfect, and I can’t point to a single company who is… so even if I was trying to play catch up to someone, there actually isn’t anyone to catch (yet!).

Below is a draft climate declaration to go on our impact page; sharing for inspiration, criticism, feedback—or all of the above.

Throw your rocks, goodness knows I’ve thrown a few myself so I’m due some karma!

“Offsets that we purchase are on top of our emission-reduction efforts, and we don’t count them as an actual offset to our carbon footprint.

Instead, the offsets we purchase are in support of great projects we believe in and choose to provide funding to, so they can further their great work on climate harm mitigation.

We continuously work to reduce emissions in our business and supply chain. It’s an ongoing commitment—we may never reach true, offset-free net-zero, but every improvement brings us a step closer.”