Social responsibility

Making a positive contribution to our community and planet

"The environment is close to our heart at Varn and we look to bring a positive contribution to our community and the planet. It’s important to us and our team that we have a positive impact in our world beyond SEO."

Tom Vaughton

CEO at Varn

We use 100% renewable electricity, recycle whatever we can and we positively offset our business and staff commute carbon footprint through buying, planting and managing our very own Varn woodland.

Our commitment to planting trees and offsetting our carbon footprint has given rise to our new ‘woodland office’ – a natural workspace designed for our team to be able to work outside and close to nature. This innovative and creative workspace is set in the middle of the Varn woodland and focuses on promoting employee wellbeing, celebrating the natural world and as well as offsetting our carbon footprint many times over.

They say you never own a woodland but just manage it for the next generation. We manage over 35,000 trees, consisting of ash, oak, beech and cherry. The woodland management plan is to not only absorb as much CO2 as possible but to also promote natural biodiversity through a small scale ‘rewilding’ programme.

Discover our woodland office

Having a carbon negative effect

Based on our calculations that include staff journeys to work and the fact we use renewable electricity, we estimate that our carbon footprint is between 14 and 16 tonnes per year. According to CO2meter.com a typical hardwood tree can absorb as much as 48 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. This means it will sequester approximately 1 ton of carbon dioxide by the time it reaches 40 years old. We are always working to reduce our carbon footprint but based on our current usage and Varn being in business until at least 2060 we should be absorbing more than 50 times the carbon we emit. This is our aim anyway; some people describe this as having a carbon negative effect, we like to think of it as a climate positive contribution.

Community support

The contribution we can make to our community goes hand in hand with our positive contribution to the environment.

We are proud to have collaborated with our local Co-op supermarket to provide a specialist recycling facility for crisp packets. Since the scheme began in May 2019, we have prevented more than 40,000 crisp packets from polluting the Wiltshire countryside or sitting in a landfill. Bradford on Avon Town Council are now supporting the initiative, which encourages people to take empty crisp packets to both the Co-op in the centre of town and the Terracycling Station, making it so much easier for local residents to recycle.

Wealth creation for distribution for good

Each of our team have a budget to invest with Lend with Care, a lending initiative which is a revolutionary way to help people in low-income countries to work their way out of poverty with dignity. The team can invest their budget in entrepreneurs of their choice and once their money is repaid, they can choose to recycle their loan to support more low-income entrepreneurs or make a donation.

We are a supporter of Business Against Poverty, donate to business start-ups in Africa and Eastern Europe, and we sponsor one child (based in India and Africa) for each Varn employee, paying for their school fees. It seems obvious to us that one significant way to help solve the environmental and poverty challenge is through education. Locally, we have recently loved being part of a Bradford on Avon art auction raising funds for a local skatepark, an important community project, supporting the local foodbank and the solar panels for the local primary school.

Meet the 'CamperVarn'

During the pandemic, it created such change in our everyday lives, that we wanted to provide our employees the flexibility of new workspaces and have since been challenging the conventional office set up. We have created the ‘CamperVarn’, our ‘mobile office’ that staff can take out and about, taking in new views and thinking differently as a result of being ‘out of the office’.

This helps Varn workspaces to become more versatile for our team, encouraging working outside with the knowledge that we are offsetting any carbon fuel emissions with our woodland space.