Did you notice a whirlwind of pictures of people in front of a pink photowall on social media the other week? That was Spark at Slush, asking people to write down a message of their choice, pose for a Polaroid picture – and spread the pictures on social media. Why, and what did the Polaroid camera have to do with all this? There’s a genius explanation...
We’re always emphasising that spreading the word about even the smallest everyday climate action you do (or did once) is a climate action in itself, since humans are very prone to replicate what other humans are doing. So if you talk about your actions, they will spread. However, at Slush we wanted to take this to the next level to make sure also people who had never heard about Spark or considered the importance of personal climate action would think “I want to be part of mitigating emissions, too!”. Hence, to add some extra motivation, we teamed up with the carbon offsetting firm CO2Esto (their name is epic: Finnish for “stop CO2”) to offset 100 kg of CO2 for each Polaroid picture taken.
And guess what? This was a winning strategy – before the day was over, we were out of film for the camera, and we had mitigated a total of 6000 kg of CO2! That equals avoiding about 38 000 km driving by a car, which is almost an entire lap around the Earth. Not to mention we had loads of fun chatting to everyone and taking all the pictures!
Why CO2Esto? The offsetting service of CO2Esto is unique. It’s not traditional offsetting of emissions by other actions like planting trees. It’s actual prevention of emissions by purchasing emission allowances from EU’s Emission Trading System (EU ETS), meaning that there are fewer allowances left for factories and other emitters to use. The EU ETS is the cornerstone of EU’s climate policy, and is therefore a well-monitored and regulated system where actual reductions in emissions are guaranteed.
What did we do at Slush apart from removing emissions off the market? We met tonnes of wonderful people; a guy who had biked to Finland from Belgium, and several members of the Spark Community, including Siiri in the picture above. It was so nice to meet them in person and hear their thoughts about Spark and what they want us to cover (hot tip everyone: send us DMs, e-mails, or pigeons with all your ideas and requests – they will be heard!). There were some super interesting talks to listen to, and of course we took the opportunity to meet with some potential customers. We also had interesting talks with bigger companies who are wondering how to get the message of what good they are doing for the climate across to their customers.
2018 has been a year of awakening in terms of climate action, and there's lots in store for a 2019 full of action!
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