According to Bowman, Sift was worried about their footprint long before they decided to go carbon neutral. “I just started envisioning this server farm with a smokestack on top belching all this carbon into the atmosphere,” said Bowman. In reality, Sift had an annual carbon footprint of 270 tons, not the billowing smokestack they imagined but still something they wanted to fix.  

Bowman said their total footprint was a relief and with an easy fix through Green Places, it was impossible not to go carbon neutral. “I feel bad that we weren’t doing this but there wasn’t an easy program… and I think now that there’s an easy service it’s sort of like to not do it would be the harder thing,” said Bowman. 

Sift saw it as their responsibility to go carbon neutral but think that it will impact their recruiting in the future. Bowman thinks that being carbon neutral will be another benefit to working for Sift. “I want this to be something that makes [employees] feel better about working at Sift,” said Bowman. “We hired two people this past week to Sift; we found these engineers through recruiters and the bill that we are paying to recruit is very material. The cost of cleaning up our carbon footprint, if it increases the probability that an engineer says yes and accepts the offer to come, it’s totally worth it.”