Spark Sustainability is a Finnish initiative that inspires people to effectively make climate-friendly choices in their everyday life. With Spark Sustainability’s Carbon Donut, individuals can calculate their personal carbon emissions and see which climate actions have the highest impact with the lowest effort, and take action. Next up, this incredible team of young Finnish game-changers is building a platform that connects climate-conscious individuals with companies that provide sustainable solutions and services: all to make the transition towards a carbon neutral society slightly smoother.
Words: Hanna-Amanda Pant
Image: Spark Sustainability Team
Why did you decide to launch Spark Sustainability?
In my previous job as an energy systems researcher, I saw that achieving carbon-neutrality is possible – if we can manage to make changes to our energy infrastructure at the same time as we abolish the overconsumption culture and move towards diets that can be sustained by just one planet. The first of those three tasks is strictly political and techno-economical, but the latter two really affect the everyday lives of people in our societies. What we eat, what we wear and how we commute or go on holiday are deeply personal choices, yet as a society, we need to influence these choices to stand a chance of mitigating climate change.
So what we’re looking at is a situation where action is needed both top down (the infrastructure investments, laws and subsidies to put a wholly new energy system in place) and bottom up (trying out new multi-modal commuting services and vegetarian recipes; reducing energy consumption). Back in 2017, no one was talking about climate action on a grassroots level to start to change the culture around how we see low-carbon lifestyles; we needed to first spark the discussion. That’s why we launched Spark Sustainability: to spark interest in a new way of living, to spark action, to spark change.
Tell me more about your mission and core values.
We’re often asked why we focus on personal action instead of political lobbying or pushing large companies to act. My answer to this is two-fold: first, there are plenty of organisations, NGOs and activist groups that already do those things in an admirable way, so there’s room for more actors in the field of influencing lifestyles and personal choices. Secondly, the point is that with Spark Sustainability, we aim for personal action to be a driver of business decisions, political agreements and technological advancement to stop climate change. What that means is that as individuals, we don’t carry the responsibility alone, but we do have an often overlooked power to influence the world around us by re-evaluating the social norms we reinforce every day; by impacting investment decisions made at work, and through consumption choices.
Our mission at Spark is to make more people aware of this power they hold, and to inspire more and more people to use it. To do this, we’ve started by making climate action easy and tangible: we want to introduce our community to the existing services that can help mitigate emissions in the midst of a busy everyday life – in order to hopefully see the supply of such services skyrocket, and in that way, accelerate the shift towards a carbon- neutral society.
Image: Spark Sustainability Team
You describe your platform founders as "a group of science and communication enthusiasts". How did you decide on becoming a team and work on one mission altogether? Do you agree it often takes a lot of patience to finally settle on a common perspective supported by everyone? Did you encounter any setbacks when crafting your business plan and vision?
How Felicia, Anna and I found each other is actually a funny story: I had been toying with the idea of starting an initiative like this for some time already, and I realised that as an engineer and researcher for whom the researched topic is never ‘ready’ or ‘researched enough’, I would never actually launch the thing on my own, because I was just waiting to know even more about any given topic (behavioural change, the psychological effects of alarmist media coverage of climate change; you name it) before I dared say anything in public. I knew Felicia through family connections, and asked to see her and talk about the idea. She was all in from the first moment on, and with renewed confidence I wrote a message in the Finnish ‘Protect Our Winters’ Facebook group stating that we were starting this initiative and looking for more people to join. That’s how I met Anna: even though we studied the same thing at the same university we’d never met there!
The three of us had a shared view of what it was we wanted to bring into the world, so in our case, it really didn’t take much time to agree internally. What has been hard in the case of Spark Sustainability though, is pairing the emission reducing mission with a model that brings us revenue to finance all of the work. It’s hard to make money telling people to buy less things!
However, on the business model front, the best thing you can do is to test as many things as you can come up with. We’ve done climate coaching, emission calculation consultation, marketed truly climate-smart brands on social media, held training sessions for other companies’ employees, done content production and looked at licensing our calculator, the Carbon Donut.
“We got the chance to go deep with the emission reduction suggestions; to let it be about human behaviour and even human feelings, as opposed to just a number on a sustainability report or an ISO standard.”
‘The Donut Platform’
Spark Sustainability
Image: Spark Sustainability / ‘The Carbon Donut’
Say, I want to work with you today to reduce my carbon footprint. How does your platform practically help to ignite change? Do I already have to be an "educated conscious consumer" to start?
When you first download our carbon tracker, The Donut, you fill out a row of questions about your lifestyle, your habits and your preferences. This gives you a starting point, and thereafter you see your results change (hopefully in a downward trend!) on a monthly (as opposed to yearly) basis. The tool generates action suggestions tailored to you, so that the actions you see are the ones that have the largest impact in your case. This means you don’t have to be educated in terms of climate-smart living at all before you start, the actions are listed in accordance with your starting point to bring value to everyone who uses the tool. By the way, this feature is one of the most important for us to work on now during beta testing when we’re getting user feedback on whether or not the filtering is currently done well; what needs tweaking and what type of actions do we need more of.
What are some of the most fascinating initiatives or people you have worked with so far, and made a change in their way of thinking?
The two things that come to mind are the climate coaching we held in spring 2019, and our consultancy work for Moomin Characters Ltd. The coaching was amazing because all 20 participants were really passionate and our meetups lasted for hours more than they should have due to all the great discussion and the good energy. We learned so much about what it is that is challenging with taking climate action in our everyday lives, how to overcome those challenges and how a tight-knit group can really help do that.
In the project with Moomin Characters, I was amazed by how strong of a support the organisations’ values offered the climate work we did together. Respect for nature, friendship and kindness all go hand in hand as core values with making sure that the organisation is as climate-smart as humanly possible, and thus working together has been an utter pleasure. There we got the chance to go deep with the emission reduction suggestions; to let it be about human behaviour and even human feelings, as opposed to just a number on a sustainability report or an ISO standard.
What do you hope that your brand communicates about Finland and its relationship to sustainability?
Finns love nature around them, and we hope that resonates in our communication by highlighting all that it gives us in terms of for example relaxation, happiness, and energy. Finland has also set very ambitious climate targets, aiming to become carbon neutral by 2035, and is hence acting as a front-runner in the field. We encourage individuals to become front-runners as well, since their actions can drive business decisions and political agreements to stop climate change.
“We think what’s needed now is a wave of can-do feeling and a deeper understanding of how much a climate friendly lifestyle can improve the quality of life.”
Image: Spark Sustainability / ‘The Carbon Donut’
Tell us more about The Donut Platform. How does it exactly help to connect consumers with climate-smart businesses?
The Donut contains a large number of climate actions that help you reduce your lifestyle emissions, and some of these actions will be connected to a product or service that offers you a concrete way to perform them. These products and services can be provided by, for example, second-hand shops, bike repair shops, railway companies, or cobblers. We will select our partners carefully, so that the user can be certain the product is actually a climate-smart choice, and that the company already supports or has high ambitions to support a circular economy. The point is to help truly climate-smart businesses grow and take over the market from less sustainable competitors – not to provide anyone with a chance of greenwashing.
What do you think needs to be done to draw more attention to the urgency of climate action? So that more people would actively participate with their everyday choices.
At Spark, we actually believe the urgency has been communicated quite well enough over the past 18 months. We think what’s needed now is a wave of can-do feeling and a deeper understanding of how much a climate friendly lifestyle can improve the quality of life. Climate action in all its forms is hard when you’ve never tried it, just as with anything else. Now is the time for those who are already acting to take their friends and family members by the hand and gently, with kindness and enthusiasm instead of scorn, show them the first, tiny steps. To cook vegetarian together. To take a holiday close to home and to celebrate a birthday with a gift card to the theatre instead of a new product no one ever needed or wanted.
I feel like it would be more efficient to get these people, the early adapters, to spontaneously and honestly talk to their friends and family about how much certain actions improve their quality of life in that particular area. Like “I started biking to work, and man I feel like I have so much more energy in the morning!”. That way we will get people on board that wouldn’t otherwise be so quick to act for environmental reasons. And everybody wins.
“It’s hard to make money telling people to buy less things!”
Image: Spark Sustainability / ‘The Carbon Donut’
Let's talk about examples of conscious choices. How can we all reduce our carbon footprint in a simple way every day, without having to draw out a detailed action plan?
There are so many different ways. That is to say, that there are surely ways that fit everyone, regardless of your preferences and habits! Some of my personal favourites when I started out myself were adding more veggies to our home-cooked dinners (I love cooking, so exploring new cuisines and recipes is always a thrill for me), turning down the heat when we were out of town (as it’s really not giving up anything at all, you just have to remember to do it), and picking direct flights whenever I had to fly somewhere. As I’ve become more climate-savvy, I’ve switched the flights to trains (most recently Helsinki - St. Petersburg, but before that Helsinki - Northern Italy. I do still fly sometimes though, I’m no angel) and we sold our car (going by taxi sometimes is far climate-friendlier than owning a car and thus taking it every now and again, even on trips you don’t necessarily need it for). Some other easy ways are lowering down your indoor temperature at home or at work (also when you’re there: 19-21°C is the recommended temperature from a health perspective), walking more, taking the steps more, buying less things you don’t need and buying the things you do need in a better quality. Really, I could go on all day, there are so many ways. Keep your electronics for longer, they are emission-intensive to produce.
What vision do you have for the future of your initiative? How can it help to advance climate-positive action and changes in the way we consume?
The vision of Spark Sustainability is bold: a world in which personal climate action drives business decisions, political agreements and technological advancement to stop climate change. That means personal climate action is pretty much the norm, not the exception: that people make climate-smarter choices on an everyday basis just out of habit; a little like we all already today know which things save us money or which things are good for our personal health.
If you’re asking what the vision for the new carbon tracker is and how that can help advance climate-positive action and changes in the way we consume, then I’d say there’s two core points: 1. With The Donut, we strive to make climate action concrete and easy, so that it’s accessible to all. 2. An important part of The Donut is the community using it; the meetups we’ll set up during 2020 in different locations to boost discussion, community connection and just the feeling that you are not alone – this is not a few people giving up things to mitigate emissions, this is a culture change just beginning and a promise of a better life for all of us.