The DuckDuckGo search engine, which focuses on privacy experience, has just announced that it has achieved negative carbon emissions from 2008 to 2020 and has pledged to increase its efforts in the next few years. The company said that it is using the gold standard to offset 125% of its upstream and downstream emissions, and hopes to provide equal assistance to the Stripe climate plan, which is committed to developing carbon-removing technologies.
When determining how much carbon emissions need to be offset, DuckDuckGo invoked the greenhouse gas agreement and divided the emissions into three main areas and additional activities. Among them, the company’s “carbon offset package covers direct emissions, indirect emissions from purchased energy, other indirect emissions from products and servers, and those that have not been covered so far in its complete product and service life cycle.
It is worth mentioning that when calculating emissions, DuckDuckGo also emphasized some of its own formulas (rather than ready-made standard models). It can be used to offset the hardware and software used by employees when working from home, heating/cooling during workdays, Lyft car-hailing fuel for participating in partner meetings, online/offline marketing (such as advertising on users’ computers), and Comprehensive emissions from DuckDuckGo search.
The company commented:
We can’t help but pass rigorous measures and have had a positive and continuous impact on the environment and society year after year, thereby offsetting 125% of emissions throughout the life cycle. We have also increased this part of the capital investment, supplemented by additional expenditures for physically removing carbon from the air, and are committed to continuing to promote these important technologies in the future.
Finally, DuckDuckGo joined the same ranks of companies such as Google and Ecosia to ensure that it does not do more harm than good on the ecological stage. The company also emphasized that they can find solutions that are more suitable for their ecological footprint in several different ways.
