2023 UNGC Communication on Progress

Sustain.Life is an active member and partner of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), and we are excited to share our 2023 Communication on Progress (CoP). This report reflects policies and performance from FY 2022, submitted to the UNGC when the reporting window opened in December 2023, following several delays in the UNGC reporting timeline.  

Participation in the UNGC affirms our dedication to the Ten Principles and our continued advancement of UN Sustainable Development Goals. Our completed submission is available here, and we have summarized our approach to each topic below.  

CEO Statement of Continued Support  

To our stakeholders,  

I am pleased to confirm that Sustain.Life, a Certified B Corporation, reaffirms its support of the Ten Principles of the United Nations Global Compact in the areas of Human Rights, Labor, Environment, and Anti-Corruption. In this annual Communication on Progress, we disclose our continuous efforts to integrate the Ten Principles into our business strategy, culture, and daily operations, and contribute to United Nations goals, particularly in the Sustainable Development Goals.  

Sincerely,  

Annalee Bloomfield  
Chief Executive Officer

Governance

Our mission is to provide our customers with a best-in-class greenhouse gas emissions management platform that supports the measurement, management, and reporting of their emissions. Through our software, users are guided toward setting and reaching meaningful emissions reduction targets.  

We believe in transparency for our users and ourselves. As a Certified B Corporation, our performance measured against B Lab’s standards is shared publicly. Our prior year’s submission to the United Nations Global Compact can be found here, and we annually publish details of our emissions inventory along with our planned actions for reduction.  

Internal transparency is maintained through regular updates from our board, composed of our CEO and Founder. Since all full-time employees have ownership interest in the company, these updates guarantee all team members are well-informed of the company’s progress.  

Related reading: Sustain.Life’s 2022 UNGC Communication on Progress
‍

Human Rights

Considering our hiring practices and style of work, our direct operations are not at risk of human rights violations. 2022 was the second year in a row of surveying our suppliers to evaluate labor, human rights, environmental, and anti-corruption practices in our supply chain. As a small company without influential purchasing power, we did not receive any responses to these assessments. In addition, we function in the digital space where automated service subscriptions often lack robust customer-supplier relationships. We plan to continue distributing supplier risk assessments and hope to gain a deeper understanding of our suppliers’ practices as we grow.  

To protect our customers’ privacy, our Infrastructure and Security Team regularly conducts code scans for security and web application scans for potential vulnerabilities. If identified, weaknesses are patched immediately. Beyond product-related security, email attachments are scanned for threats, and all employees are trained to identify and report suspicious email activity which is tracked in an internal database. In 2021 and 2022, we received third-party penetration testing in preparation for our SOC 2 audit. We achieved SOC 2 Type 2 compliance in January of 2023.  

Labor  

Our workforce is 100% remote with teams across the U.S., the UK, Ireland, Singapore, and Australia. All full-time employees receive benefits including:  

• Paid holidays  
• Unlimited paid vacation time (insert minimum day count)
• Paid parental leave  
• 401K plan
• Learning and Development Budget Allowance  
• Sustainable Purchase Stipend
• Personal Emissions Offsetting

Upon onboarding, our Employee Handbook is shared with each employee. This handbook includes our anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies and our formal grievance procedure. We had no reported instances of harassment or discrimination in 2022.  

As a technology company, we strive to maintain gender diversity across all levels of our company, and in 2022 exceeded the national average of 34% women in STEM. In 2022 our executive leadership maintained a 50% split across male/female and an almost equal split for individual contributors. Our greatest opportunity to improve gender balance is at the management level. We do not have any employees that identify as non-binary.

‍

Environment

Sustain.Life prioritizes keeping our emissions as low as possible. Our workforce is fully remote, we do not occupy any physical office spaces, and we do not produce a physical product. We do not produce any scope 1 or scope 2 emissions and we do not directly consume any water or produce any waste. Team members work on company-provided laptops and monitors which occasionally need maintenance or replacement. When necessary, devices are returned to our Vice President of Infrastructure and Security and stored for repair and redistribution. Electronic waste will not be produced until 2024.

As a SaaS platform focused on emissions measurement, management, and reporting, we use our software to compile our own emissions inventory. Though we do not have any scope 1 or scope 2 emissions, we measure our most material scope 3 categories: purchased goods and services (category 1), business travel (category 6), and employee commuting (category 7). Since employees work from their homes and do not have to commute, we include a portion of their household energy consumption to our inventory under Category 7.  

Like most companies, our purchased goods and services produce most of our emissions. For now, our measurement of purchased goods and services is a spend-based calculation. We would like to gather more precise supplier-specific values, so we surveyed each of our suppliers in 2021 and 2022 with no success. We will continue to request this data from suppliers, and in the meantime we have implemented policies that give priority to vendors who have set Science-based Targets.  

There are several internal efforts to elevate sustainability and climate knowledge across our team.

• Education Modules- Members of our sales team are given access to evergreen education modules that cover carbon accounting, science-based target setting, global regulations, and third-party standards and frameworks. These informative exercises strengthen each team member’s understanding of corporate sustainability practices and spark more informed discussion.  
• Full Team Briefings- As the regulatory landscape shifts, we provide company-wide briefings on regulatory or reporting developments.  
• Individual Learning and Development- Each employee has a budget for professional growth which may be spent on climate-specific education.  
• The Week in Sustainability- Each week, members of our Sustainability Team discuss climate or sustainability-related stories of the week. These conversations are recorded and publicly shared to encourage conversations on recent developments in sustainability.  
• Sustainable Purchase Benefit- All team members are annually eligible for reimbursement toward a qualifying sustainable purchase. Though these purchases take many shapes (carbon-free transit like bike share memberships, renewable energy procurement like solar panels or solar powered generators, independent food production equipment, etc.) and extend the company’s mission to support sustainable practices.  

We strive to keep emissions low wherever possible. While we work to reduce our operational emissions, we annually offset our corporate emissions as well as the personal emissions of each of our employees. We do not consider offsetting a replacement for an emissions reduction strategy, but we are well positioned to contribute to meaningful sequestration efforts while we work toward reduction across our value chain. We offset our corporate emissions for 2022 through the Prairie Pothole Grassland Carbon Program, a joint effort of Ducks Unlimited and North Bridge Carbon. The program protects approximately 28,000 acres of grasslands and key breeding grounds for migratory waterfowl from disruptive development.

Anti-Corruption

Sustain.Life organized as a Benefit Corporation in 2021 and became a Certified Benefit Corporation in 2023. To maintain this status, we are compelled to conduct business in a manner that creates public benefit and considers the interests of all shareholders at the board of directors’ level. Since our founding, ethical business practices have been an unwavering core of our company.  

We attempted to understand anti-corruption practices throughout our supply chain in 2021 and 2022. Without responses from our suppliers, we are unable to gain a deep understanding of each vendor’s anti-corruption policies. Due to our size and primary operation in the digital space, we can reasonably assume our corruption risk is extremely low. We plan to continue surveying suppliers as we grow under the assumption that a larger presence begets supplier responses. In the meantime, we have developed a supplier code of conduct which outlines our expectations of vendors. Moving forward, we will stipulate adherence to this code of conduct in contracts with suppliers.