How Did LatestDeals.co.uk Help the Environment in 2020?

Hi everyone, I’m writing to share our environmental impact notes of 2020 and our actions to help improve the planet.

Latest Deals produces CO2 equivalent when you load the website. Every page view uses energy and that has an environmental impact.

I want us to be fully open and share what we’re doing to be Carbon neutral, and also to go beyond and be Carbon negative.

First, the numbers:

In 2020, we estimate the Latest Deals website produced/used:

• 22,315 kg of CO2 equivalent. This is the same as boiling 3 million cups of tea. Or the same weight as 148 sumo wrestlers.
• 46,985kWh of energy. This is enough to drive an electric car 300,000km (Around the world 7.5 times)
• 1,008.7 trees. The website emitted the same amount of carbon that 1,008.7 trees absorb in a year.

Our Actions to Help:

To be carbon neutral and offset this negative environmental impact, Latest Deals has partnered with Trees.org, a sustainable tree-planting charity that plants trees in Africa. This charity not only plants trees, but does so in the form of Forest Gardens, organic forest-agriculture that provides food and income for the poor. You can read more about it on its website, and their own Impact Reports. By partnering with them, we plant trees and at the same time, lift people out of hunger and poverty. A charity deal stack.

As members of Latest Deals you know we like to be the best and set the gold standard. So we don’t want to be just Carbon neutral, we want to be Carbon negative (i.e. make our environmental impact positive rather than just neutral).

In 2020 Latest Deals gave enough to plant between 3,000 - 4,500 trees

• This is 3-4x more than our Carbon Neutral target. We will offset the CO2 equivalent produced and become Carbon Negative.
• This is a range because of cost variances by location of where trees are planted.

Other Actions We Took to Help:

Other things we have done that reduces the amount of CO2 equivalent produced at source in 2020:

• Kelsey has spent a lot of time re-coding the website to be more efficient. We are now “cleaner” than 83% of web pages (our main competitor is 68%) in terms of the amount of data transferred and therefore less energy consumed when using it.
• We produce 0.24g of CO2 equivalent for every page view (our main competitor is 0.5g). The average webpage on other websites is 4.61g (19x more).
• Our website is hosted with Amazon AWS. This company has committed to using 100% renewable energy by 2040 and so steadily, the energy used from Latest Deals servers will get more green.

Final Notes

There are of course many other things we should consider for which I have not done so here. We have chosen to focus on our website for now and by doubling contributions to be carbon negative, we hope it helps offset any non-calculated negative environmental impacts. The great thing about trees is that they keep contributing every year.

We of course cannot include the environmental impact of every product listed on the website. Whilst we would love to be in a position to do so, it's not feasible. Each producer along the supply chain needs to do their bit and reduce plastic, increase recycled material use, reduce packaging, and as we have done, become carbon negative. Together, we can do good.

I hope this update provides some insight into how Latest Deals seeks to be a world-leading community and that you can feel good being part of it! If you have any questions please pop them into the comments and we'll do our best to answer.