Corona in the City

Fighting climate change and supporting the local community during the corona crisis

Two years ago, a bunch of us started thinking of how there was no way to pick products based on their actual climate impact. There are nutrition labels on products that help us choose healthy foods; so why not carbon footprints that help us choose climate-friendly foods? More so, everyone in our circles asked us the same questions – is chicken better than pork? Is beer better than wine? What about organic vs local? So we decided, it was about time we made it happen and GreenSwapp was born. GreenSwapp is a carbon-neutral online grocery shopping app that does 3 things –

• it allows you to see the carbon footprint (climate impact) of their food so that you can make informed decisions on what to buy
• it helps you reduce your impact by providing alternative recommendations that have a lower impact and
• offsets the entire carbon-footprint of your cart (which means growing trees to suck out the same amount of emissions as it took to produce and transport the food you bought), allowing you to shop completely impact-free and guilt-free.

The cool part about this is that shoppers can see how much impact they personally need to shop under (aka the “carbon budget”) so that the planet doesn’t warm by more than 1.5° C.

On Sunday 15th March, the Dutch government closed many types of business including restaurants and bars and encouraged people to stay at home. GreenSwapp happened to launch its carbon-neutral online grocery store app in Amsterdam, one week before this lockdown. During GreenSwapp’s first week, there wasn’t much awareness and business was slow, but in the week that followed the lockdown announcement, GreenSwapp received 20 times as many orders than the week before. The week following that, orders doubled again. When we grew to the point where we couldn’t handle the daily volumes anymore, we put out a call for volunteers. To our surprise, in just 1 day, we had 25 volunteers from our local community sign up to help us get the groceries to people’s homes so they could keep themselves and their kids safe. It was humbling to see that in the face of adversity, time and again, our community stepped up an supported us so that we can all come out of this crisis in an environmentally resilient way.

GreenSwapp also works with local food markets (such as the Ten Katemarkt) and food producers, to sell their products online, package them in zero plastic, and deliver them by cargo bike (“bakfiets”) to households and offices. The GreenSwapp team are happy to have been able to support the local community during the Corona period, whilst at the same time encouraging sustainable, carbon-neutral shopping.

You can find more details here – www. greenswapp.com.

We are submitting a short text about GreenSwapp, an app based food delivery company that allows shoppers to offset the carbon impact of their groceries. During Corona time we saw a big growth in demand because everyone needed food but was staying home. Included is a photo of our CEO with a GreenSwapp volunteer plus fresh fruit and vegetables from the market.

by The GreenSwapp Team