Jumbo goes Carbon Neutral. Here's why.

Our decision

At Jumbo, we are helping to build an internet that everyone can trust. We want you to be in control of the data that companies have about you, and we think you should be in charge of how (and if) they use it.

Recently, we have been thinking about the wider tech industry and our place within it. While we are building tools to help protect your privacy and security, we are still fully embedded in the tech ecosystem. That means at Jumbo, we are still benefiting from a system that does not fully account for the social and environmental cost of decisions that a company makes.

In order to more responsibly shoulder the costs of our work, we decided to make Jumbo a carbon neutral company. We view it as a small step towards building a more sustainable system that protects the rights of all. We didn’t want to pat ourselves on the back for this small step, but we wanted to share our thinking with you.

Why and how did we do this?

The cost of running servers isn’t priced to account for the pollution that they generate. Plane tickets are not priced to account for the CO2 they emit, and those costs are passed on to others.

At Jumbo, we don’t have a lot of servers (actually, there are no server components to process data for Jumbo to function). But we are using Apple’s and Google’s servers to distribute the app. We also travel around the world to work with our teammates, which means purchasing plane tickets.

Because of this, we are working with Pachama, a startup that offers a marketplace to support carbon offset projects. To fully counteract our carbon emissions, we are supporting efforts in Jari Pará (Brazil) to fight deforestation as well as efforts at Hudson Farm (US) to improve forest management.

We think this aligns with our mission. As we ask tech companies to account for the risks they take with users’ data, we thought we should hold ourselves to similar standards about the choices we make that affect others.

What do you think? Feel free to reach out with thoughts or opinions. You probably already know that you can find me at [email protected] and I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Talk soon,

Silas + the team at Jumbo