Reducing carbon emissions and offsetting our footprint

March 27, 2023

For more than a decade, Shine has supported the UN Global Compact to adopt sustainable and socially responsible policies and practices in our business. As a software engineering company that influences the practices of our clients, we feel it’s important to pursue opportunities to reduce our carbon footprint and that of our clients. 

At Shine, that has meant constantly pursuing efficiency in using computing resources, mainly through the cloud computing capabilities of virtualisation and dynamic scaling. Not only is this a benefit to the environment, but also a source of financial savings.

And now we’ve gone a step further by implementing a carbon-neutral policy to offset our carbon footprint fully. To ensure we understand our environmental impact entirely, we engaged experts to estimate our carbon footprint based on Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions. We know that Scope 3 emissions are the ‘gold standard’ in measuring our impact because they consider not only our direct emissions but also the indirect emissions from the products and services we purchase.

However, we are not content with just being carbon neutral. We are committed to making even more of an impact. In the 2021/22 fiscal year, we estimated our emissions to be 177 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. We have purchased 240 tonnes of carbon offset from Carbon Positive Australia, which is one-third more than the amount required to offset our emissions.

And to make our impact greater, we are also matching any carbon offset purchase or donation made by our staff to Carbon Positive Australia, dollar-for-dollar, up to 120 tonnes. This effectively doubles our total commitment and further mitigates the impact of our software engineering work.