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Thanks for the many recommendations in regard to last week’s intro asking for policy frameworks that can help companies fight eco-collapse. An even larger number of readers wrote in telling me that they’ve been looking for something like this, eager to hear what I could find. So here are some of the most useful suggestions:
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The best policy template came from Code for Australia: their Environmental Care Policy is easy to read, comprehensive, and practical. They also created their own carbon calculator and wrote about why and how here. Some links are only relevant to Australian businesses, but you could easily adapt this to a business anywhere in the world. Exemplary accountability and transparency here – thanks for sharing, folks!
- The Green Web Foundation has an open-sourced sustainability policy on GitHub that is more general.
- For those who want to dig in deeper, the book The Responsible Company by Patagonia recounts “how the company and its culture gained the confidence – step by step and misstep – to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately share its discoveries with companies as large as Walmart and as small as the corner bakery.” The book includes a ‘responsible company checklist’ that is available for free here. (ZIP/XLS)
- For those of you working in the corporate/enterprise world, Salesforce is offering a lot of insight into their approach to sustainability. (And yes, I have heard about the good news of Microsoft going carbon negative. Worth noting, though, that they have also pledged to continue to help optimise fossil fuel extraction.)
- Although it’s all in German (use Google Translate), I wanted to mention digital agency Shift for listing some unique green policies on their website, such as offering company bikes, having a cargo e-bike that employees can borrow, only ordering organic food for the office, offsetting all business travel (including their employees’ commute), and producing energy-efficient code by, for instance, following the Rule of Least Power.
‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.’ Conducting a thorough carbon footprint audit is usually the best way to get started. Online calculators are often either too basic or too complicated. Fortunately, there is now a growing number of professional carbon auditing services available in most countries. According to one reader, a carbon audit not only helped them determine their carbon footprint but also “pointed out many other operational inefficiencies within the company, making it a worthwhile investment anyway”.
– Kai
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Apps & Sites
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Collaborative documentation
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Emvi is a platform for team knowledge sharing, whether it’s company policies, documentation, tutorials or any other documents where collaborative editing can be useful.
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Celebratory habit tracker
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Celebrate sticking to your goals: Confetti is a beautiful little habit tracker with a fun reward for ticking off your daily to-dos.
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Translation platform for teams
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Are you running a digital service that you would like to make available in more than one language? Traduora is a platform that facilitates collaborative translation of all content elements of your site into multiple languages.
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There is almost no info on the website and I haven’t tried it myself, but Balloon describes itself as a tool “to receive files, collect photos from an event, and so much more straight to your Dropbox. There’s no signup for senders, and no need for you to manually download files.”
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Indie Mag of the Week
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Ligature Journal is the printed voice for a community of people who are interested in design and the thinking that goes into design.
– Latest Issue: 8 (Place: Soul)
– Frequency: 2 issues/year
– Formats: print
– Origin: Australia
Every week we’re giving away five copies to randomly selected DD readers. Keep an eye on your inbox to find out if you’re among them!
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Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation
“A deeply immersive chronicle of how the optimistic entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley set out to create a free and democratic internet – and how the cynical propagandists of the alt-right exploited that freedom to propel the extreme into the mainstream.”
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Eco-friendly phone case
The Good Mobile Case is “is made from linseed plants waste, grown by a local farmer in Sweden. 100% biodegradable and truly eco-friendly.” Each case can be swapped at anytime for a new one with their circularity system. You can even offset the carbon involved in shipping it to you. You can find a breakdown of their environmental footprint here.
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Overheard on Twitter
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I still think my favourite thing that’s ever happened to me on the internet is the time a guy said “people change their minds when you show them facts” and I said “actually, studies show that’s not true” and linked TWO sources and he said “yeah well, I still think it works”.
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Food For Thought
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An unexpectedly inspiring commencement speech around cybersecurity: “But we need to be careful to not let our adversaries distract us from our enemies. These words are not synonyms. Our adversaries are people. People who come and go depending on our job, their job, what’s happening in the world to drive certain conflicts and what products we have shipped. Our enemies, on the other hand, are the things that hold us back from doing better. And the real enemies in the technology world are arrogance, complacency, and a lack of empathy for those we are supposed to protect.”
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This excellent, insightful article warns us about comparing previous technological revolutions with what’s happening today, yet at the same time it highlights astonishing parallels of the societal shifts triggered by the invention of the printing press and the internet: “Unlike monastic scribes, animated by the one true way, printers were profit-seeking entrepreneurs. They published whatever would sell. Before long, you could find anything in a printed book – conspiracy theories, magic spells, recipes, satire, erotica. You could find support for any point of view. You could just make something up and set it in type, and people would say, I read it in a book.”
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Scandinavia just won’t stop doing all the right things: the Finnish government’s defense against misinformation starts at the Kindergarten level and continues all the way through to high school: “The exercises include examining claims found in YouTube videos and social media posts, comparing media bias in an array of different ‘clickbait’ articles, probing how misinformation preys on readers’ emotions, and even getting students to try their hand at writing fake news stories themselves.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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Bird in a Sheet is a poster series that extracts colour gradients and forms found in different bird species.
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Calvin Nicholls makes intricate sculptures – most of them animals – out of paper.
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Utile and Utile Display are elegantly flared sans in two finishes for smaller sized text and display typography with an overarching aim for clarity and optimal legibility.
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The first time in a long time that I bought one of the things I featured in DD: Max Guther’s illustrated timeless calendar A Modern Man is a ‘calendar for those who encourage change’. Available from his shop.
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The Week in a GIF
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Email us the URL to your favourite GIF and we might feature it here in a future issue.
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