We’re certified climate neutral

FAIRTIQ has been a certified climate neutral company since 2017. We work with leading climate solutions provider myclimate to offset all greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the company's activities.

As a rapidly growing company our greenhouse gas emissions have tripled from 2017 to 2019. Over the same period our staff grew by a factor of 3.5. If we take this growth in staff into account, we managed to decrease our emissions intensity in 2019 – down 23% per FTE compared to 2018. What happened?

The increase from 2017 to 2018 was mostly due to our expansion outside of Switzerland, resulting in a lot of business trips. In 2019 we doubled down on sustainable business travel and more consistently used public transport for business trips whenever possible. Reto Schmid, our Business Development Director, has some great life hacks on how to travel sustainably and still maximize your time with family and friends. We also started hiring business development representatives in our main markets and tried to reduce the number of in-person visits.

2020 and the way ahead

We don’t have final numbers for 2020 yet but due to Covid-19 we’re expecting a sharp drop in absolute emissions and our emissions intensity.

We were not sitting still. Here are some actions we took in 2020:

Reduction of commute trips: We opened an office in Zurich. We have quite a few employees in Zurich and we want to avoid long commutes. The employees around Fribourg used a local co-working space for the same reason.

For our christmas present in 2020 instead of sending out packages to all our partners we gave them an even better present. We made donations to the myclimate project “Shape your trip,” which educates young adults on how to travel with a reduced carbon footprint. You can find further info in this blog post.

Additional measures for 2021 and later to further reduce our carbon footprint are:

Work from home: we'll stick to flexible working in a post-pandemic world; we're convinced that most of the employees will work from home regularly. Nevertheless, we’re looking forward to meeting in person again in the offices.
Awareness for Heating in the offices will be further raised. We aim to turn off the heating for rooms / areas which are not in active use.
We will fully switch our accounting system to paperless by the end of 2021
We want to have a clearer view on CO2 emissions caused by our use of computing power/data storage/network usage

How does the compensation of CO2 work?

FAIRTIQ cooperates with myclimate for the calculation and the compensation of the CO2 emissions.

myclimate invests in more than 144 climate protection projects in 41 countries. Emissions are reduced there by replacing fossil energy resources with renewable energies, and by implementing local reforestation measures with smallholder farmers and energy-efficient technologies. myclimate climate protection projects meet the highest standards (Gold Standard, Plan Vivo), which are not only proven to reduce greenhouse gases locally and regionally, but also make a positive contribution to sustainable development.