WorkOS is Carbon Neutral

In early 2019 when we began writing the first lines of code for WorkOS, we decided to structure the company as fully remote. At this time (pre-pandemic), building a remote-first startup raised many eyebrows especially with traditional investors who strongly believed that startups must be geographically co-located. However, to us it was clear the future of software organizations was a distributed model. Whether it took one year or ten, it was inevitable.

I feel the same about becoming carbon neutral. The role and responsibility of a corporation has always extended beyond simply generating value for shareholders, and I believe that it will someday become commonplace for all companies to have a carbon reduction and offset strategy.

To achieve carbon neutrality, we worked with Watershed to measure our carbon impact across the entire company — from our travel, remote workers, contractors, and even our cloud service vendors. Since most of these do not have direct options for carbon zero purchasing, we are funding carbon offsets and carbon removals to neutralize all remaining emissions.

Carbon offset and removal projects we’re funding include:

• Reforestation: Forests are natural carbon sinks, and planting more trees helps remove and store carbon once in the atmosphere. This purchase helps fund a reforestation program in Ghana.
• Refrigerant destruction: Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are greenhouse gasses 10,900x as potent as Carbon Dioxide (CO₂). This purchase funds the collection and safe destruction of these gasses. CFCs are collected from dumps & recycling facilities, and destroyed in an incinerator.
• Nitrous oxide destruction: Nitrous oxide (N₂O) is a greenhouse gas 298x as potent as CO₂. Artificial fertilizers, rich in nitrogen, are a key contributor to global nitrous oxide emission. This purchase enables fertilizer plants to maintain a more expensive process that turns the nitrous oxide into harmless byproducts inside the reactor. These projects are entirely funded by offset revenue and result in the permanent destruction of greenhouse gasses.

We also took an unusual step of retroactively calculating our entire historical carbon footprint — starting with the company’s inception in early 2019 — and offsetting the entire amount as well. I am proud to say this means WorkOS is a fully carbon neutral company. We look forward to doing our small part to ensure a sustainable future for the next generation.