Effective 19.12.2019. Updated 24.02.2021.

We are living in an era in which human activities have crossed the limits of the Earth’s planetary boundaries. As a consequence, the safe operating space for humanity and the natural world around us are at risk.

Our environment consists of ecosystems of varying sizes, from the flower beds in our back yard, via forests, lakes, and oceans, to the entire biosphere of Earth. Common for all of these is that they contain communities of living organisms and non-living things that work together in the biogeochemical cycle, including soil, air, and water, and light and heat from the Sun.

Runbox is a small company and our impact on the ecosystems in our environment is also small. There are no emissions to air, water, or ground directly from the operation of Runbox’ services. However, other activities required to run our business have an ecological footprint and small impacts are important because the cumulative actions of each of us have a disastrous effect on our environment – “many a little makes a mickle”.

Therefore we want to decrease our ecological footprint as much as possible, and compensate for any impact our activities may still have. We want to do this not just for the decreased impacts in themselves, but to join a growing movement towards environmental responsibility and hopefully help inspire other companies and individuals to do so as well.

Fortunately, our operations are located in Norway, and we benefit from the nation’s clean hydropower – our servers, all electric equipment, and our office are powered by renewable energy. Norway has also implemented strict waste regulations that decide how waste is processed and recycled.

Furthermore, our servers and office are located in Oslo, where circular economy is a priority. For instance, we benefit from Oslo’s waste collection system, which is based on the collection of five waste fractions. Plastics, glass and metal are used for products, organic waste to biogas and bio-fertilizer, and ordinary waste generate energy for heating of houses and buildings. In addition, we can deliver discarded electric and electronic equipment, and all outsized waste, to one of seven recycling facilities.

Oslo was named European Green Capital 2019 by the EU for these and other environmental initiatives.

Our commitment

We shall comply with applicable environmental legislation and educate our organization about environmental issues and the environmental effects of our activities. Furthermore, we shall more than compensate for our ecological footprint and continually work to improve our environmental performance.

Our environmental impact

The environmental impact resulting from our activities includes greenhouse gas emissions and other consequences in the following categories of our operations:

Data center

The data center where the Runbox servers are located is powered by 100% renewable hydropower and does not emit greenhouse gases.

Procurements

Procurement of new servers and other hardware shall result in a resource-saving architecture. Safe recycling of electronic equipment is also part of our Information Security Policy. We shall use environmental guides such as https://www.ethicalconsumer.org when making purchases for our business, for example personal computers, and mobile phones but also office supplies, printer paper, groceries, etc.

Offices

We shall facilitate greener working conditions including certified renewable energy for our office spaces and for employees and consultants who telecommute and work from home (where available). At our headquarters we shall limit consumption of office supplies and sort all waste according to the Oslo recycling system, and we shall encourage our team to use similar arrangements at their workplace when available.

Transportation

Runbox is an Internet-based organization and we make extensive use of telecommuting technologies for all communication including regular meetings. Physical transportation is utilized for some aspects of our operations such as physical meetings and our biannual workshops.

Partners and stakeholders

We shall encourage our partners, stakeholders, and associates to reduce consumption and recycle as much as possible.

Compensation

When our activities or operations do produce greenhouse gas emissions, we shall compensate double this amount with donations to the non-profit environmental charity organization One Tree Planted leading to a carbon negative result equal to our footprint.

Our ecological footprint and our compensation shall be publicly available on our website and be updated annually.

Environmental NPOs

We extend our commitment to provide free email services to non-profit organizations with an environmentally oriented profile.

Please get in touch with us via Runbox Support to apply.