Monzo's environmental impact

Good point although maybe… they could fix it to one card generated rather than multiple

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As simple as it is, while I was working at Nationwide they were physically helping to plant hundreds of trees in various phases in local grounds, and assisting charities who have an interest in this sort of thing (each of the ~16,000 staff got 2 days a year to assist with charities).

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Good point! I was thinking that maybe a lot of the infrastructure might have been run on renewables anyway. Would be good to see an analysis of where Monzos major emissions are. It might turn out that the power consumption actually produces very little because companies are developing their own renewable sources for their data centres anyway. In that case it might not actually be that expensive or onerous to get to net zero! :seedling:

I also wouldn’t mind paying a small fee to offset my impact, like I currently do with flights. Could be added as part of the Monzo Plus bundle, or maybe there’s a way to incentivise it with Monzo Points as mentioned in the old thread?

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By the sounds of it they don’t have a cohesive plan regarding environment, but are generally working in that direction anyway. With no solid foundation and review though they will likely miss things. There’s a ridiculous number of things you can just pass by and not realise are a problem.

It’s also worth considering that Monzo are still not profitable, like it or not from a business perspective they have to balance what can and cant be done while they are in their current state. I don’t expect them to be going planting trees or wind farms, offsetting carbon, or moving away from AWS just because its not 100% renewable. We have to be realistic.

It would though be interesting to see a plan in place for their goals in this.

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Without upsetting any green activist (which is getting impossible to do). People really get in a tiff about this safe the planet stuff! We have kids giving up school trying to save to world. Marches and rallies about climate change (but use car, bus or train to get to them). Every company pressured to lower emissions. Maybe the world will go pop one day? Or not… regardless how much we walk, fart or leaving the little red standby on! We can always be conscious, but worrying and worrying get rediculous in my eyes. Live your life guys

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Here’s an interesting banking concept for a credit card with some nice design. They’ve created a kind of carbon economy using something called the Aland Index that is supposed to measure the impact of your consumption, and allow you to set limits on your emissions through purchases. Sounds like a cool concept but I’m not sure how exactly they could measure the environmental impact of of your purchases just from transaction data. Suppose its a start.

Some other features:

  • Card is printed on bio-source materials with ink captured from pollution.
  • It will give you options to compensate for your climate impact by donating to various causes.
  • Financial rewards from connected stores for making more responsible purchases.

Really though one of the best things is probably just to buy less stuff…would be interesting to see how a credit card provider would negotiate that aim when their business relies on people spending money.

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I love this idea :bulb:

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This is a type of green-washing in my opinion. Are banking staff really in the best position to plant trees? Also, “rewilding” is generally considered more environmentally impactful than planting trees. Planting trees is not necessarily the answer - churning up the soil to plant the trees can actually release carbon dioxide in the short tern. See twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/georgemonbiot/status/1140870734899830784?

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Hi! I’m a potential customer, looking at switching a business account from HSBC, mainly because I want to move to a bank with a strong environmental policy, because I’m deeply concerned by the general lack of action on the climate crisis. Where we invest our money matters!

I see there is lots of chat about things Monzo are doing - offices powered by renewables, lights off at night, minimal use of paper etc. However these are superficial and have very low compared to the impact from the of the money the bank manages, ie where it is invested.

I may have misunderstood how Monzo works… I’m assuming the bank invests it’s customers money in other places? If so:

  • Does Monzo have a clear ethical or environmental investment policy?

  • Has Monzo ever invested in fossil fuel industry, any of the large corporations which actively fund and promote climate change denial, or companies which fund deforestation (for example Blackrock, JP Morgan, HSBC, Santander…)?

I think this information is important to share, the service tou provide looks good and I hear lots of positive things, but if Monzo doesn’t have a clear environmental policy then for me it’s no better than the big banks.

It doesn’t. It keeps money with the Bank of England, and it lends money to customers by way of loans and overdrafts.

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I use Monzo saving pots and I would appreciate the option to select partners that do not invest in environmental degradation (or weapons manufacture, mass incarceration, etc.). I am sure many Monzo users already feel this way, and the writing is on the wall in terms of the growing popular preference for ethically laudable and publicly accountable business practices.

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I absolutely agree with Alexis. I don’t want to make interest by funding industries that are destroying the world or harming people, and I can’t be sure that Monzo’s savings pots avoid this. It would really help if Monzo had a clear policy on the climate and other ethical categories, but its ethical policy hasn’t been updated in a year.

You might be interested to know that Monzo doesn’t score great on the Earth Day Switch ranking for bank accounts https://www.earthdayswitch.org/

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imo best thing is to educate about common misconceptions

  • plastic != single use plastic - there are plenty of applications where plastic is far superior to glass when used correctly
  • recycling is very costly energetically and v inefficient
  • carbon offsetting part of the prob not the solution
  • not having biological children is a far more noble action than being vegan and never using a tumble drier
  • most people who claim otherwise can go without a car if they really try
  • owning a hybrid instead of a petrol car is still massively bad for carbon emissions
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You forgot to include using the internet and visiting websites like @username1 posted which is also bad :wink:

actually no as the point is by making efficient changes (going car free, having one fewer children) vastly outweighs things like using the internet to view that website by factors of trillions over your lifetime.

Trillions? Have you got some data to support this please?

The data centres, network infrastructure and all the cabling both underground and under the ocean add up to a lot. You should look it up.

All of this is growing at a collosal rate with no sign of slowing down what so ever. It will grow even more with the 5G roll out and the fact that we can transfer even more data quicker too :slight_smile:

I think it depends on what the internet replaces or offsets

in banking that would be the heating of branches, and the transport to and from branch

if you look at social media, does this on occasion replace a car or public transport journey

if you look at online streaming, does this replace the heating of a cinema, energy running projector system etc, and the transport to and from cinema

One of downsides is the ease of online shopping, especially from abroad. The environmental impact of airmailing something of dubious quality from China, vs buying a better item that has been shipped on a container ship is obviously not favoring online

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Exactly :slight_smile: but for someone who signs up to a forum just to preach how others should be doing more to save the environment is wrong. I think they need to take a look at what more they could do themselves first, especially if they immediately dismiss your point as soon as you mentioned it :confused:

If you really cared that much about the environment you’d limit your internet usage to only the essentials. For example, Facebook and Google would be off the list straight away as they practically have an island of datacentres running 24/7 burning through so much energy. This would then go right the way down to non-essentials like signing up on a bank forum which will also contribute albeit much less. Every little helps though :smiley:

Anyway, I’ve said my bit now, I just wanted it adding to the list! I’m going to leave before I upset more environmentalists.

actually i signed up to post on a variety of topics. this topic asked “What more could we be doing?” so i replied to that.

yes and the vast majority is on cloud platforms like aws, azure, cloud platform etc. we know what parts are power hungry (e.g. spinning magnetic drives, gpus for parallel applications/deep learning, and some enterprise multi-thread cpus). a simple vps in a datacentre running on a ssd is a tiny fraction of daily internet-related emissions.

the website you mentioned, https://www.earthdayswitch.org/ is running behind cloudflare on hetzner which uses renewable energy and has one of the best pue scores around 1.2. by using hetzer rather than self hosting they already save 90% of energy usage.

of course we cannot discount the rare earth metals used (and the terrible human and environmental effects from their mining) nor the fact that any power production has collateral effects on environment and biodiversity (which applies to all industries).

here in europe the infrastructure is much better in terms of gCO2 than say australia or the us. we also know that high-co2 applications (e.g. youtube with high storage, gpu and cpu costs due to the storage and video transcoding. so browsing a html/php/apache website like the the one mentioned) is VERY different to running tensorflow through aws or dozens of ffmpeg threads.

there’s about 830m tons of co2 through all itc worldwide (50% devices, 25% each network inrfastructure and datacentres) but the usage follows roughly the 80/20 rule.

so, overall, quickly browsing a website like that is using something of the order of 1-2 gCO2. in comparison, going child free saves 4395 tonnes CO2 (source: The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions - IOPscience). this is a factor of about 4.35 billion so you’re right, nowhere near trillions.

but the point i was making still stands. you can mitigate as much as you want for internet. even if you cut down your internet use and persuade 5 others to completely stop using technology, it’s a drop in the ocean compared to one person on your street having one fewer child. your energy can be much better used educating people about that rather that distracting with concerns about internet carbon footprint.