Our approach
Environmental protection and sustainability are central for Oksidia, both within our own internal actions and procedures and with the technology we develop.
We follow a green-minded approach and sustainable business practices. We are a relatively small team and we work in technology which, luckily enough, makes being green and sustainable a bit easier for us than for some other lines of business. This, however, does not mean we overlook our responsibilities.
For example, we are paperless and we recycle our trash. We favour online meetings with our customers, but if an onsite meeting is necessary we use public transportation. When we have to drive, we carpool when possible. We share our offices with other companies and our staff work from home 4 days a week to avoid additional commuting. If we need to fly, we fly direct flights and use airlines that have publicly known and acknowledged sustainability plans; KLM and Finnair.
Our main product Eepos School Management System was developed to help schools and councils to move towards a paperless working environment and to accelerate green transition within schools and councils. Eepos offers cloud-based, electronic and paperless methods to handle all school administrational tasks and work including planning, resource management and communication. Eepos also offers technological solutions for remote education and meetings.
Sustainable business
Our whole supply chain follows our sustainability standards. We select our third-party service providers, subcontractors and partners based on their overall acceptability, including modern and sustainable business methods, technological levels and price. And we always prioritise sustainability over price.
We are green also with our sales and marketing. We use online sales meetings and collective webinars to train and meet several customers simultaneously. We encourage our customers to move to paperless management and we develop new features constantly to our Eepos to achieve that.
Bigger carbon handprint
We strive to achieve a bigger carbon handprint (impact on others’ carbon footprint reduction).
We encourage our customers to have all communication between schools, staff and pupils’ homes centralised in one easy-to-use system so that the used technology wouldn’t prevent people from focusing on the education itself. The more in cloud, automatic and seamless the school management is, the larger the environmental benefits are.
We encourage our customers to have all their data, documentation and management in the cloud so that manual admin work could diminish.
We develop online tools for distributing and using homework to prevent unnecessary printing and train our customers’ teachers to use them efficiently.
We train administration to use remote solutions more fluently and guide teachers to adapt to remote learning and teaching if necessary. In Finland alone, we manually taught nearly 600 music teachers to teach online when the pandemic hit in early 2020.
We try to help pupils and their families by developing the system in a way that it would be as self-explanatory and would need as little IT literacy as possible.
How do we measure, monitor and report our actions and impact?
We rely on our Code of Conduct created by our management board. The document introduces Oksidia’s sustainability planning, acceptable ways of working, how to train customers and other stakeholders and how to do business in a sustainable manner.
We also try to help our customers to see their current status regarding carbon emissions. Eepos school management system collects, stores and manages data regarding for example teacher work in different locations and time used for travelling. Customers have access to automatic reports that give them insights on travelling time and mileage and, based on this data, we can calculate approximations on CO₂-emissions.
Continuous aspiration to develop
Even though our line of business is easier regarding the green transition and our team is relatively small, we acknowledge that our work with carbon emissions reduction is still in progress and continuous improvement is necessary. Our company is growing and we must not forget the changes in emissions that it brings.
There are several ways we can reduce emissions, from reducing office temperature and utilising our office space to the maximum to dumping fossil fuels and flying even less. We will adopt these changes during the 5-year plan we have set.
We calculated our baseline emissions in 2022.
| Year | Staff | Scope 1 (0,145/head) | Scope 2 (0,627/head) | Scope 3 (1,264/head) | Total |
| 2022 | 11 | 1,6 tCO₂e | 6,9 tCO₂e | 13,9 tCO₂e | 22,4 tCO₂e |
| 2024 | 16 | 2,3 tCO₂e | 10,0 tCO₂e | 20,2 tCO₂e | 32,5 tCO₂e |
| 2027 (current emissions) | 22 | 3,19 tCO₂e | 13,97 tCO₂e | 27,81 tCO₂e | 44,97 tCO₂e |
| Targeted emissions year 2027 | 22 | 2,4 tCO₂e (0,1/head) | 11 tCO₂e (0,5/head) | 22 tCO₂e (1/head) | 32,5 tCO₂e |
Scopes’ descriptions:
Scope 1: Direct emissions from owned or controlled sources
Scope 2: indirect emissions from the generation of purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling consumed by Oksidia
Scope 3: all other indirect emissions that occur in a company’s value chain
Calculate, reduce and offset
We also acknowledge that we can reduce our carbon footprint only to a certain extent. However, we have a great opportunity to develop our carbon handprint. We have discovered several ways to help others to reduce their emissions and drive environmental benefits but the best and the most sustainable approach to carbon neutrality or positivity is offsetting our CO2 emissions.
We decided that from 2022 on Oksidia we will offset 150% of the carbon footprint we create. We set our offset rate to 150% to make sure our carbon footprint is covered and there are no blind spots in our emissions’ calculations.
Our target year is 2027 which gives us five years to perfect our approach, plans and procedures. With our current planned actions, our CO₂ emissions per head calculations we will reduce our carbon footprint by 27,7% (from 44,97 tCO₂e to 32,5 tCO₂e ) and we will offset the rest.
For the year 2022 we have offset emissions for 33,6tCO2.
Offset with Compensate
We will cooperate with a trusted and well known organisation Compensate to make sure the compensation we make has an impact. Compensate is a Helsinki-based operation that includes climate change experts, business leaders, tech entrepreneurs, communications professionals, and an independent panel of world-renowned scientists
Compensate consists of Compensate Operations Ltd, which runs the day-to-day business operations of the group, and the nonprofit Compensate Foundation, which focuses on advocacy work to improve the integrity of the voluntary carbon market.
For further information, click here.
Together towards a greener future
We’re going green and we hope you join us in this adventure.
If you have any ideas, questions or thoughts on the green transition and our carbon neutrality, please do not hesitate to contact us.