Sustainability is an integral part of our company culture at Kiwigrid. We already contribute to climate protection every day by working on our products. But that is not enough for us. Sustainability also has an important role to play in the day-to-day lives of Kiwis. True to the motto "Climate protection concerns us all," we do our best every day to keep our ecological footprint as small as possible. Last year, we turned this into a team challenge and launched "Kiwis for Climate Action".

The challenges we faced

Our goal was to get a feeling for what each of us can do personally to reduce CO2 emissions. For nine weeks, we set ourselves various everyday challenges that can help reduce our personal carbon footprint. Here are a few examples:

●    This week I'm limiting my shower time to a maximum of three minutes.
●    This week I'm washing each load of laundry one temperature level lower than I'm used to.
●    This week, I'm using potatoes instead of pasta or rice as the main ingredient or side dish for every main meal.

For each of these tasks, all participants learned how much CO2 they personally saved by making the change.

Here's how the challenge went

For each task they passed, they collected points for their business unit (BU). The more points, the more CO2 was saved. The winner was the Service BU, which was able to reduce its carbon footprint the most.

The conclusion of our colleagues

Stefan from the "Products" business unit took on the challenge and got his family directly involved:

„We wanted to see what there is still to optimize in our everyday life. We already implement many of the ideas and since I have been living vegan for a long time, some points were easily earned. The hardest thing for me was to give up coffee – unfortunately this cereal coffee is not an alternative for me in the long term.“

Philipp, who collected points for the business unit "Platform", was also supported by his wife:

„The Challenge is a great way to get started if you want to familiarize yourself with the topic of "living more sustainably". You get a good feeling for what is important when you want to save CO2. Since the tasks are initially limited to one week, you don't have to do without everything right away. In the end, it's not a matter of cutting back on everything. Often it's enough to reduce the amount you consume in order to make a contribution. True to the Pareto principle, 80 percent of the result can often be achieved with just 20 percent of the total effort.“

The goal of our team challenge was to inspire each other to be more sustainable in our everyday lives. We succeeded in doing so. But it's not our only initiative on the topic of sustainability. Many other ideas that we have already implemented internally can be found in our blog article on sustainability at Kiwigrid.

 

Would you like to work with colleagues who care as much about sustainability as you do? Take a look at our career page or apply directly.