We are proud to announce that as of February 2021, Ruby Datum has become carbon neutral. Carbon neutrality refers to the achievement of net zero carbon dioxide emissions through either balancing, offsetting or eliminating carbon dioxide emissions. Pippa from the Ruby Datum team has put in extensive efforts to make this happen.

Our Founder and Managing Director, Nick Watson, has always been passionate about sustainability, as can be seen in his work with Surfers against Sewage (SaS). SaS is a  grassroots movement that has grown into one of the UK’s most active and successful environmental charities. Nick has been a regional representative for SaS and is committed to engaging others in the awareness of the impacts of the over consumption of plastic in addition to maintaining efforts to keep UK beaches clean and reduction of water pollution. 

As it has been imperative for Nick to remain consistent with personal sustainability efforts, he wanted to ensure this transferred to Ruby Datum. Ruby Datum itself helps companies to transform their data into the digital world and reduces physical office space and documents, thus reducing one’s carbon footprint through cloud services. Ruby Datum also encourages sustainability efforts from employees too, as remote working removes travel costs and emissions. To achieve carbon neutrality, Ruby Datum has opted to offset carbon emissions and in doing so, will plant six trees.

Conclusively, environmental sustainability has been an important goal for Ruby Datum with an overarching goal to become a more sustainable and environmentally conscious organisation with continuous efforts to improve Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). In the future, Ruby Datum will actively target and offer discounts to those also pursuing environmental sustainability in addition to sourcing suppliers who share the same vision.

Ruby Datum Emissions Calculations

Ruby Datum’s total CO₂e per year from servers: 4200 kg CO₂e, this was calculated as follows: 

• A standard 2019 R640 Dell server Specs with electricity usage of 1760.3 kWh per year (chosen as server from recommendation on this article, but can update if exact server models used are known) 
• Emissions of 0.0024 kg/kWh CO₂ for renewable energy / green energy for Redcentric and Telehouse
• Emissions of 0.23314 kg/kWh CO₂ for non-renewable energy for CenturyLink
• 1 Virtual Machine (VM) having its own physical server: Telehouse = 5, Redcentric = 7 (total renewable/green 12), CenturyLink = 9 

(0.024kg CO₂ x 1760.3 kWh) x 12 = 506 kg CO₂e per year 

(0.23314 kg CO₂ x 1760.3 kWh) x 9 = 3693.567078 kg CO₂e per year. 

Total: 506 kg + 3693.567078 kg = 4199.567978 kg rounded up to 4200 kg CO₂e per year. 

The previous calculations do not include the carbon emissions from manufacturing of the servers.  This is however, the highest possible estimate for usage with each VM having its own physical server, which may not be the case.  

Supplier Emissions

• Microsoft – carbon neutral 
• Sendgrid – owned by Twilio who use AWS, who is “committed to achieving 100% renewable energy use”, “achieved more than 50% renewable energy use in 2018”. 
• Jira – Atlassian currently 15% renewables, working with lots of climate groups. Aim to be 100% renewable by 2025 and achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. 
• Bitbucket – as above 
• Voxcloud – claims using cloud-based server uses less electricity than onsite phones thus reducing carbon footprint 
• Zoho – none* 
• Xero – 100% carbon offsetting 
• QMS connect – none* 
• Clicksend – none* 

For those companies without information regarding environment policies or energy policies it is assumed that they don’t make any effort to offset their carbon emissions or become carbon neutral. In such cases, we will endeavour to source carbon neutral alternatives and will offset a minimum of 20% extra on our existing emission offsets to account for existing suppliers that do not make such efforts due to our low usage of such platforms.

Phone Emissions

Using data from research, which cannot be validated by Ruby Datum, it is assumed that 292 hours of phone usage produces 1000 kg CO₂e. We have overestimated with this in mind for our calculations.

Offsetting

To achieve this milestone, Ruby Datum have opted to offset carbon emissions through tree buddying which offsets 1tCO₂ (per tree) through verified carbon standard reducing deforestation projects in Brazil and the UK. To become carbon neutral from these calculations, Ruby Datum will pay for 6 trees to become carbon neutral.