Our sustainability efforts – 2021

It’s been a busy year for Ailuna. In January we launched the first version of our mobile app. Even though it wasn’t the start of our journey as a company, launching the app was the biggest step to date towards building a sustainable business. A business that not only helps you to build sustainable habits, but that also has a positive impact in its own right. 

Here’s what we’ve done in 2021, followed by some of our plans for 2022 and beyond. And if you want to download the app, you can get it for free now by clicking here.

Our business impact & sustainability 2021 (1)

What we’ve done in 2021 – as a business

So, what has Ailuna’s business sustainability journey looked like in 2021?

We joined 1% for the Planet

In May, Ailuna joined 1% for the Planet. By joining 1% for the Planet, we commit to donating at least 1% of our annual revenue (not profit) to environmental nonprofit organisations that have been approved by 1% for the Planet.

It also gives us accountability – to every other 1% for the Planet member and to you, our users, that, regardless of our company’s performance (we donate 1% of our revenue whether we make a profit or not), we will always be doing something to give back.

We are helping to spread positive news

At the beginning of 2021, we announced our partnership with good news website Happy Eco News. 

Happy Eco News is a website dedicated to sharing uplifting and positive environmental stories to give hope that we can collectively tackle the world’s issues. In committing to help spread this positive news further to our own audience, we want to inspire people to make changes through hope and positivity, not doom and gloom.

We ran a successful crowdfunding campaign

In September 2021, our crowdfunding campaign came to a successful conclusion. We are delighted to have raised the funds we need to focus our 2022 efforts on developing Ailuna for X, our upcoming offering for businesses, government, charities and education.

We partnered with Waterwise for a special Ailuna dare

For 2021’s Water Saving Week, we partnered with water-saving charity Waterwise to create a special Water Saving Week dare in the Ailuna app. 

Since the dare launched, we have seen over 600 days of collective water-saving action by Ailuna app users. And you don’t have to just take part during Water Saving Week – check out the Ailuna app now and you can start your own water-saving habit straight away.

Our “head office” is based in one of the most sustainable places on Earth

Ailuna founders Lars and Helene reside on the tiny Danish island of Samsø. Samsø was the World’s first renewable energy island and the island even got a “Climate Leader” award at COP26.

The Ailuna app is hosted on Google Cloud

The Ailuna app is hosted via Google Cloud, which is one of the most progressive clouds in the industry when it comes to sustainability.

Google has committed to decarbonising its energy use, aiming to be totally carbon neutral everywhere, all the time, by 2030.

To find out more about Google Cloud and its sustainability efforts, take a look at this page.

We use green web hosting

Our website is hosted with Siteground, which uses 100% renewable energy as well as making numerous other efforts to being a green web host. Find out more about Siteground’s sustainability in this blog post.

We look before we leap

Before developing and launching a new feature that requires a lot of resources, we as a business run simple and quick experiments to determine whether or not this feature is needed by our users. An unwanted or unused feature uses unnecessary energy, so we always think and research before launching something new. This helps us reduce our carbon footprint and keep Ailuna as useful as possible for our users.

We’re mindful of who we partner with

When we look into what solutions or technologies we could use as a business, we research their sustainability credentials and try to choose the greenest option available (such as Google Cloud as mentioned above).

What we’ve done in 2021 – individual actions

We are so lucky that the Ailuna team is as committed to making a difference as we are as a business. We all know that individual action soon builds up to drive huge positive change.
 
Here are some of the actions Ailuna team members have been taking at work to help support Ailuna’s sustainability mission:
 

Katrina

Product Manager Katrina lives with her family in Bangkok, Thailand. She admits that living sustainably in Thailand is not as easy as it is in many other countries, but it hasn’t stopped her implementing a whole host of actions into her working day to help make a difference. 
Here is what Katrina has been doing to help Ailuna be a positive impact business:
 
  • She uses voice call over video call wherever possible
  • All of her work is done remotely, with no work-related travel
  • She is completely paperless, and never prints anything
  • She makes her email inbox as green as possible by unsubscribing from a lot of business newsletters
  • She keeps her inbox tidy and deletes unimportant emails as soon as she’s read them to help reduce her digital carbon footprint.
  • She tries to minimise the number of business tools that she installs and uses on her laptop
  • She uses solar power to charge her laptop and her iPhone when working outside 
 

 Gemma

Dare Creator Gemma is immersed in the sustainable living world in her local area, so it’s no surprise that her efforts extend into her working life, too. 

Gemma makes sure she reduces the brightness on her screens to save energy. She also makes her devices last as long as possible by taking good care of them, unplugging them when not in use and repairing rather than replacing them.

She works entirely from home and her home is powered by renewable energy.

Katie

Ailuna’s Head of Content Katie keeps her email inbox as close to zero as possible at all times and, like Katrina, she unsubscribes from unwanted email newsletters and only subscribes when she feels she will truly benefit from receiving regular emails from the person in question. Katie also keeps her (Google) cloud-based storage tidy, only keeping files she really needs.

Finally, she uses Ecosia as her search engine when doing blog research whenever she can, and when she does use Chrome, she has the Refoorest extension installed, which plants trees with every partner website she visits. 

Lars & Helene

Ailuna founders Lars and Helene’s home is also their office, and it’s over 200 years old! This means that in its original state, it’s not very energy-efficient.

Since moving in, Lars and Helene are working on energy improvements like secondary glassing, loft insulation, and keeping the temperature inside at 17-19 degrees to save using too much energy on heating.

The development team

Our app development team work from an office in Leipzig, Germany and have all changed their habits to make their workplace as green as possible.

They make sure all recycling is done properly and only use rechargeable batteries in their wireless keyboards and computer mice.

The dev team also take their own lunchboxes to work – either with leftovers from home or to take to their local cafes for lunch takeaways, saving on packaging.

The majority of team memebrs also walk or cycle to work whenever they can instead of driving.

Ruth

ruth-2

Dare creator Ruth has installed this carbon tracker so she can keep an eye on the impact her web browsing has on the planet.

Ruth has an eco-friendly printer and only prints when she absolutely has to. She sources all her stationery from the Green Stationery Company and recycles all her pens with Terracycle.

Our plans for 2022 and beyond

Here are some of the ways we plan to reduce our footprint and increase our impact in 2022 and beyond.

Our website is getting an upgrade

Whilst we’re very proud that our website is sustainably hosted, we still have work to do.

In 2022, we plan to rebuild the Ailuna website to make its carbon footprint as small as possible. What’s more, by giving our website a green overhaul, it’ll load faster and be a much nicer place to hang out, so this one’s a win-win!

SME Climate Hub commitment

In 2022 and beyond, the Ailuna team is committed to satisfying the requirements from SME Climate Hub. This demonstrates our commitment to cutting carbon and protecting the planet.

All our products

All of our products (including future launches) support the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals as part of our mission of helping organisations and individuals achieve Net Zero by 2030. 

The future

We know that to be a truly sustainable business, our efforts will never stop and there will always be more we can do to make a positive impact. We will continue to communicate the efforts we make, as well as the efforts we know we need to make as Ailuna grows.


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