Our Carbon Offset Program

By Darshan Somashekar - 03/16/2023

The team at Solitaired recognizes the importance of addressing the environmental impact of its business and operations. Online platforms like ours, despite being in the cloud, have a physical impact, whether that is the energy consumption of the servers we use, or the energy usage of the visitors that play games on our sites.

That's why we are proud to announce that now, and going forward, we are offsetting the CO2 emissions of our entire business operations and visitor usage of our sites. We view this as the most holistic way to think about the carbon footprint we generate.

When you play games on Solitaired, you are playing sustainably. We don't just offset the emissions our servers create - we also offset the emissions your device creates when on our site. We believe we are one of the first sites to be doing this in our casual gaming space, and we encourage our peers to consider something similar.

How do we calculate our carbon offsets?

We calculate the carbon emissions for our business by taking our server emissions (as provided by our hosting provider, Amazon Web Services). We also add an additional buffer based on our team's work devices and home office usage.

We then estimate the carbon emissions of our users, by taking the amount of monthly sessions on our site and the amount of hours per session, to get the total usage hours per month generated cumulatively by all of our users. Then we multiply that by an emissions per hour approximation, based on high-performance, low-efficiency reference laptop. This gives us the total carbon emissions we need to offset, which we do via buying offsets at Terrapass.

We buy these credits monthly based on our latest data regarding our site's usage and growth.

Why do we use Terrapass to offset emissions?

We chose Terrapass after researching a number of providers, and were reassured about their process due to their portfolio audits. We also were reassured based on other corporate clients working with them.

As a team, we are happy to find ways that make playing on our site, not just fun, but sustainable too. We hope you enjoy playing with us, and please tell your friends to do the same!

About the author

Darshan Somashekar is one of the founders of Solitaired. This website was originally inspired by his mother-in-law, who couldn't find the original game she used to play after a big software update. In addition to programming, Darshan collects Hot Wheels cars and likes listening to 90s music.

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