Yayzy, a London-based startup, has launched an app to revolutionise people’s motivation and ability to help tackle humanity’s biggest threat by making their own environmental impact truly personal.
As the user spends, YAYZY shows them the carbon footprint of each purchase in real time. For the first time, users can immediately connect their spending to its impact on the planet. The app aims to solve the big intention/action gap that stifles progress towards Net Zero by empowering millions of would-be climate change heroes.
Imagine buying your morning coffee, knowing in real time its contribution to climate change, then simply tapping a button on your phone to instantly make up for it. By making sustainability this easy and accessible to everyone, YAYZY hopes to unleash the good intentions of millions of people who want to play their part to do just that - simply and effectively.
YAYZY works its magic through combining leading-edge technologies from the previously separate worlds of Fintech (open banking) and Green technology (carbon tracking and carbon offsetting). The result is an app that shows the user, more accurately than ever before and via a quick glance at their phone, how their actions impact on the environment - with a button ready to tap to offset it.
Mankaran Ahluwalia, cofounder and CEO of YAYZY said, “COVID lockdown gave us a rare glimpse of what a low carbon future could look like as NASA satellite images revealed massive drops in carbon pollution and beautiful clear skies. While emissions have gradually risen as lockdown eases, YAYZY wants to put us all in the driver’s seat to control our own environmental impact and collectively work together in a journey to keep carbon emissions below the 2-degree target.
“It is clear from a plethora of surveys that the majority of people want to address climate change before it is too late, but that a huge intention/action gap blocks much of it. Our solution with YAYZY is to make environmental impact ‘up close and personal’ and the action to tackle it super easy, all via your phone.”
Founded in London in 2019, YAYZY first released its mobile app earlier this year to help individuals automatically track the carbon footprint of every purchase they make and connect their spending to its impact on the planet.
The app, available on iOS AppStore and soon coming to Android, uses payment data via Open Banking to automatically calculate the carbon footprint of each purchase and give users a picture of their total monthly carbon emissions. This makes the carbon footprint calculated more accurate and bespoke to the individual.
YAYZY then encourages users to compensate for their emissions via carbon offsetting. This can be done ad hoc, item by item, for even the morning coffee or by signing up to a monthly subscription to either carbon offsetting projects or their own unique climate portfolio. This portfolio would bundle multiple projects together for a more holistic impact and actually remove carbon from the atmosphere. All of these projects have been carefully selected based on a strict criteria and also advance the UN Sustainable development goals.
In the app users can also find tips to reduce their carbon footprint, ecofriendly retailers near them or insights into lifestyle choices that have the highest environmental impact.
YAYZY uses the highest quality and most credible data to calculate the user’s carbon footprint; the same source used by the UK, US and numerous other governments, Microsoft, Google etc. The business is also advised by world-leading experts in carbon emissions measurement and its impact on the environment, including the award-winning Dr. Sangwon Suh.
Mankaran Ahluwalia continued, “Our goal is to build a sustainability dashboard giving users a complete picture of their lifestyle choices and an easy route to how and where they spend - and eventually save and invest - to unlock positive environmental impact.”