Pursuing our quest to communicate sustainability, a focus on long-term resilience, restoration and regeneration is embedded across our operations and services, including our travel and tree-planting program, where we have offices, and how we produce our quarterly magazine and the palette of communication services that we offer.
Sustainable Mobility
“Death to the company car,” some of our staff say; so, REVOLVE has a no company car policy. Instead, REVOLVE offers an electric-bike leasing plan to its staff that we are implementing in Brussels and in both cities we recompense staff taking public transport when commuting to work, encouraging less traffic in the city and more sustainable local mobility, ultimately hoping for cleaner, fresher and healthier air for all.
Electric-Bike Leasing Plan
As part of our commitment to facilitate healthy sustainable lifestyles, REVOLVE engages in a bike-leasing scheme that provides our staff with affordable access to new bikes.
Saying no to cars, the scheme offers both a sustainable option for our commutes, but also the opportunity for weekend adventures and greater urban mobility.
As a general rule, REVOLVE avoids flying and will choose train travel whenever the journey is less than six hours. For longer trips, we do take airplanes.
We have been in projects related to exploring alternative fuels and we believe hydrogen is a sustainable solution for mobility and transport.
REVOLVE tracks all its travel for its business and projects. We work with Reforest’Action is reducing greenhouse gas emission by planting trees.
REVOLVE links its tree-planting efforts with global and regional communication campaign as well.
As part of the ForestChallenge for our Cities4Forests project, we planting trees in Indonesia and Haiti for every image submitted to the contest.
Via the AMWAJ Alliance, we have contributed to tree-planting initiatives such as the Beirut River Forest in the eastern Mediterranean.
Climate Action
SDG 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
Climate finance continues to increase but so does the global average temperature.
REVOLVE has purposefully chosen to have offices in more environmentally-friendly locations, or in buildings that are making the effort to participate in the energy transition.
In Brussels, REVOLVE is located at the Renewable Energy House (REH) in the European Quarter, a stone’s throw from the European institutions that are either up the street (European Parliament) or around the corner (European Commission, European Council). The REH is famous for being a pioneer in integrating different sources of renewable energy into the building; these sources include: geothermal rods in the earth of the courtyard; solar thermal tubes on the roofs; heat pumps in the basement; photovoltaics embedded in windows; as well as a compost point and a small urban garden that REVOLVE contributed to making possible.
Contact: Stuart Reigeluth
In Barcelona, REVOLVE is based in the Nest City Lab, which is an urban sustainability lab built on the principles of permaculture – a land management approach that replicates patterns found in natural ecosystems, using systems thinking. With 80 permanent members, the Nest brings together like-minded change-makers, offering a space to exchange knowledge, and engage in debate that informs and inspires action. With nature at its center, the Nest’s working space is integrated into a food forest and urban aeroponic farm, with growing towers, fruit trees, and more. With a LEED Platinum certification and a natural water filtration system in place, the Nest’s facilities have integrated the latest innovations in sustainable building.
Contact: Patricia Carbonell
We want our offices to become zero-emission buildings or in more technical terms: we want our offices to be part of the so-called Nearly Zero-Energy Buildings (NZEB) movement. Given the increase in remote-working, we consider that it’s important to have sustainable offices for when we do use the more formal space.
Our zero-waste policy spans a broad spectrum of products, from our office materials to the leaflets, flyers, roll-ups and other communication materials we make for projects. We look at the full value chain, from the origin of the product (where and how it was made) to its delivery and distribution (how and where it was shipped or used).
REVOLVE produces a quarterly international magazine that it distributes digitally and in print to our subscribers and partners. We are aware that any form of printing has an environmental cost, so we ensure that the paper we use is chlorine-free, which is more important being recycled, and the paper we use is either PEFC- or FSC-certified, which means that it should come from sustainably-managed forests.
While the sourcing of products (in this case paper) is always a difficult journey to follow and to verify to the source, on the distribution side we work with EcoPostale in Belgium for local deliveries and mailings on bicycle, e-bikes or small e-vehicle trucks. For larger, international shipping, we rely on larger companies. All extra copies are distributed at environmental/climate-related events to further raise awareness about sustainability.
For public information campaigns, such as the large-scale photo exhibitions that REVOLVE has carried out for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) during the UN General Assembly in New York City, the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (CoP) in Bonn, and the EU Sustainable Energy Week (EUSEW) in Brussels, we have worked to minimize the impact of the canvases by repurposing them into bags and folders for our partners.
REVOLVE also considers the carbon footprint of digital services such as website development, hosting, and maintenance. We work with web hosting companies that rely on renewable energy sources to power their installations. While no solution is entirely hermeneutically sealed to carbon emissions, REVOLVE makes the effort to find the partners that are working in the direction of being more sustainable.
For example, our hosting provider Infomaniak offsets its own CO2 emissions by 200%, including, for example, manufacturing and disposal (recycling) of servers, generating electricity (even renewable), staff transport to get to work and air travel required for business. Infomaniak is MyClimate-certified and has been for over 10 years. This Swiss non-profit foundation was set up in 2002 at the EPFZ Engineering School to provide comprehensive climate protection services. As a green web host, Infomaniak is currently offsetting the carbon it produces by supporting a CO2 storage project in a forest reserve in the Swiss canton of Jura (Vallon de Soulce, Undervilier).
All of the websites we manage are 100% powered by renewable energy. To be more precise with Infomaniak, the energy is provided by: 60% hydro power (“TÜV SÜD EE01”-certified) and 40% renewable energy (“Naturemade Star”-certified).
Our non-profit, REVOLVE Circular, is dedicated to communicating circularity around the world. REVOLVE Circular advocates for a systemic transformation toward a circular economy and an inclusive circular society. Going beyond the predominant Reuse-Reuse-Recycle narrative, REVOLVE Circular aims to counterbalance the discourse by putting forward other circular action imperatives, such as Refuse, Reduce, Rethink, Remanufacture.
REVOLVE Circular is breaking new ground with the first-ever global circularity perception survey called Imagine Circularity, which seeks to understand how different stakeholders see and imagine a circular economy. Imagine Circularity is a learning experience that confronts participants with the basic concepts of circularity. REVOLVE Circular initiative, Imagine Circularity has been translated into multiple languages and counts with the collaboration of partners worldwide.
Against the odds of a linear economy, REVOLVE Circular is promoting the production of the first-ever dramatic comedy: Circularity.ng. The film, produced in Nigeria, is a commercial social impact movie that will entertain and educate its global audience about a different way of consuming, producing, and living together.