Watch on YouTube and Spotify and listen on Apple Podcasts.

Season 3 Wrapped: How Far We've Come

We’ve just wrapped Season 3 at Glad - and what a season it’s been.

Between July and September, our growing community funded 7,998 kilograms of climate cleanup. That’s nearly eight tonnes of greenhouse gases permanently removed from the atmosphere that wouldn’t have been without you. Every pound of membership added to the Climate Pot is making a measurable difference.

This season, our Climate Pot reached just under £2,000, funding a diverse mix of solutions: biochar, biomass storage, enhanced rock weathering, biomass sinking, and direct air capture. Each approach removes carbon in a different way, but together they help clean up our shared atmosphere.

We also made a few refinements along the way. We now talk about climate cleanup funded instead of carbon removed so far - because transparency matters. And while each removal takes time to be delivered and verified, we’re proud to share exactly where every pound goes.

Beyond the numbers, Season 3 has been about growth and recognition. We won Best Social Impact Startup at the 2025 Startup Innovation Awards, a moment that celebrated what we’re building together. We launched our Partner Charter, a three-step process that ensures every brand we feature aligns with our values. And we invited the community to have a say through weekly brand votes that help shape the future of Glad.

Our savings network also grew rapidly. We now feature over 25 live brand partners with more than 50 waiting in the wings - offering up to £2,600 in potential annual savings for members. That’s a huge leap forward in making Glad both meaningful and valuable.

Behind the scenes, we upgraded our platform, improved how savings are managed, and introduced new AI tools to help us work smarter as we grow. And yes, we even started our Chats With series – filmed conversations with our partners, exploring how they’re helping clean up the atmosphere.

As we roll into Season 4, our focus shifts to bringing Glad into more workplaces. We’ll be partnering with service-based businesses across the UK to help them support their teams with everyday savings while funding climate cleanup with every membership.

To every Glad member – thank you for being part of this journey. And if you’re not a member yet, you can still join the movement as a Gladvocate at gladclimate.com/gladvocate. It’s free to sign up, and you’ll get all our updates, insights, and stories as the mission continues.

Here’s to Season 4 - bigger, bolder, and even more impactful. Stay Glad.

Transcript:

Hi there, welcome to Glad tidings, your weekly update on the progress we're making towards cleaning up our atmosphere. I'm Ben Wynn and today it's wrap time. That's right. We've just wrapped our third season as Glad And I thought I'd spend our time today to just explain how far we've come in the last three months. So that's between July and August, 2025.

Okay, let's start with the thing that matters most the amount of cleanup that we've funded as a community in our third season. And that comes to 7,998 kilograms. So just shy of eight tons, 8,000 kilograms. As we know in the grand scheme of things, that's not a lot, but it's 8,000 kilograms that will be removed from the atmosphere that wouldn't have been if it hadn't been for you guys. And so remember this comes from your membership fees. So your membership, we pool together across all of the members of the Glad family and we pool it together into a climate pot. And that climate pot is just shy of 2,000 pounds, 1,999 pounds for this season. And we buy greenhouse gas removals, a whole portfolio of different things. And in this season, the price is 25 pence per kilogram. So the math is relatively easy. Even though they're not exact numbers, 2,000 pounds, 8,000 kilograms. And the solutions that we're supporting this season include biomass storage, enhanced rock weathering, biochar, biomass sinking, and direct air capture. Now, I've already done a couple of videos about each of these solutions. And my intention is to do...a kind of primer video for you on each of them and ultimately to dive really deep. Right now, let's just leave it as these are the solutions we'll be supporting. And if you want to learn more, the Glad website is where you can find out a lot of information about the solutions that we support to clean up our atmosphere. So then I guess the question you might be asking is, well, what happens next? We've pulled together the money into the climate pot. We know how much clean up that we'll fund, but what actually happens next? Well, there's quite a lot of steps that we have to go through. So we've run the maths, we have the breakdown of exactly what we'll buy from which partner. And now what happens is we start to deploy that money. And when we've agreed with that partner how much we'll buy, and it's at the point that we've transferred funds to them, that's when we consider that portion of the climate pot deployed. They then have to do work. It depends very much on what they're doing, who they are, what their solution is, what their timing is, whether they're dependent on seasonality, all sorts of different variables and factors. Let's pick on one example. So Biochar, you might have seen we did a site visit to one of our partners, Restord, during the summer. And so we can use Restord as a good example of the kind of timing from the end of the season, from that initial deployment of the funds until the carbon is actually locked away. And what happens in Restord's case making biochar is we agree with them, we transfer the money to them and it's at that point they know that they need to remove a certain amount of greenhouse gas from the atmosphere on behalf of Glad members.

And it takes a little while for that to get into their production line. In their case, I think it was around three months from the first purchase we did with them. And at the end of that process, particularly with Biochar, it's about locking away the greenhouse gas. They are independently verified and get a certificate to prove the amount of carbon they've locked away. And when we receive that certificate, that's when we consider the impact delivered, or in other words, the greenhouse gas removed and locked away. And so what you will see for season three as we just wrap it is immediately you'll see very little of the funds deployed because we haven't yet spent it, but in the coming days we will have transferred the cash to our partners. They will have the money and they will be going through the process of the cleanup. And then it takes time to actually get it delivered. And the timing varies wildly.

If, for example, you're working with enhanced rock weathering, it can take 20 years for the full amount to actually be sequestered or captured. And so what we will see for each season is an increasing amount of delivered or sequestered, increasing over time. So it's definitely one to keep referring back to, and it's not an instant fix. What matters is that we make each season as big as we possibly can.

And I believe what matters is we're fully transparent about where the money is going and exactly what's happening. Okay, oh, the other thing to mention there is, unfortunately, we live in a world where we can't make exact buys. So let's go back to our number, 7998 kilograms. That's not, unfortunately, 8,000 kilograms. It's 7998. But what we're actually...able to buy from our partners are kind of round numbers. Think of it as whole tons. And what that means is we end up with a bit left over. And that's what we call our residual. And we have a residual for each season. It varies, of course, based on exactly what we can buy with each partner and what the overall total was. But that residual simply rolls over. So that is an amount that goes straight into the following season and then gets deployed during that season.

So there'll always be an element of carryover. We've got a small amount of residual in season three that just immediately rolls into season four. What else have we done this season? Let's just go through that. So one thing I've actually already just mentioned is the way in which we describe what we're up to. We've changed this season because originally what we were saying, we have our totaliser. Totaliser is something like 54,000 kilograms right now. And

What we were saying is greenhouse gas removed so far, that was kind of the line we were using and then whatever the totaliser was, but it wasn't correct. And it was pointed out to us by someone in the community who said, but you haven't actually removed that greenhouse gas yet, which is a really valid point. We've changed that because what we have done is, climate cleanup funded so far, 54,000 kilograms. And that's much more accurate, much more technically correct. And so we're pleased to have made small tweaks like that. So climate cleanup funded so far, 54,000 kilograms, roughly 8,000 of which comes from season three. So what else have we been doing? Well, actually the dominant thing we've been doing in season three is focusing on savings.

And what we've been doing is trying to increase our savings value metric. So it's a metric that we use, we use it internally, I've communicated it to you before, and really all it is is the amount that you can save up to every year as a member of Glad. What that means is we have our brand partners, they give us the savings. Let's say they provide 20 % off. As we add that saving from a particular brand partner, we work out what that means you could save up to and increment the savings value. And right now at the end of season three, we're at 2,600 pounds. So phenomenal really, if you think it costs five pounds a month to be a member, therefore quick maths, 60 pounds a year, and you could save up to 2,600 pounds. And we've done that from a standing start in season three. We did season one and season two with a slightly different approach. And what we were doing then is speaking to as many people as we could. And the reason we focus on savings is simply because the overwhelming feedback that we got was paraphrased in different words, expressed in different ways, but paraphrased as what's in it for me? What's my short term return? What's my reason to actually contribute?

And what we have focused on is providing that incentive. In season three, from a standing start, we've introduced over 25 brands currently live on the site. We've got another 50 waiting in the wings in our pipeline, and we are adding brands to the site, savings to the site every single week. And the amount of savings you can get access to currently £2,600. So that will increase a lot as we continue to add savings partners during season four and it simply means that the value of Glad is increasing week on week. What else have we been doing? Well, we've been busy. We won an award which is a fantastic accolade. During season three, we won best social impact startup at the 2025 Startup Innovation Awards. So a great piece of recognition for the work that we're doing as a community, as the Glad family, striving to clean up our atmosphere. So really proud of that one. Also really proud and delighted to have such positive feedback on the partner charter that we introduced. So quick reminder, we've started Season three we started adding brand partners. Naturally the first question is well, who should we add? Well to answer that question we've built out what we call the partner charter and that is a three-step evaluation process. First step is a kind of immediate gate. It's an eligibility check. It's to ensure that the brand partner that we're evaluating isn't involved in fossil fuels, in fast fashion, in gambling or any kind of industry that would be harmful to individual or planet.

So there's the eligibility check. Stage two is due diligence. And due diligence, we actually built an AI agent to help us with this. It's where we dive deep into the brand, looking at their financials, their news, their customer reviews, all sorts of attributes to see if there are any red flags, anything we're not aware of, and to kind of surface, is this a partner we think that we'd be comfortable working with? Do we think it would work for community. But that's not where it stops. The third stage of the partner charter is the community vote and that's where we put it to you guys and every single week we've been putting new brands in front of you and you've been voting whether you think this is a good fit and a good saving for members of our community. So we've got into the rhythm of doing that now as I say we're adding brands every single week and if you're a member of the community you get the opportunity to vote. So you're shaping what Glad become and what those savings actually are. So that's worked really really well.

We've also, I mentioned earlier, we've been down to Cornwall, we went to Restord, one of our partners doing Biochar, and we started the process that we would like to do for all of our removals partners, a site visit and a deep dive into the world of how they go about cleaning up the atmosphere. And with Restord, it was all about biochar. We're actually yet to produce that and publish that story for you. And one of the reasons for that is it's actually turned into a bit of a mini series. We call it the Chats with series and it's where we sit down with partners and other people in the industry to just have a chat with them really. So it's in an environment not dissimilar to this, content not dissimilar to this, but instead of me just talking to you directly, it's myself or another member of Glad chatting with the partner. And we've done a couple of these now with brand partners and with removals partners, and they're going to be coming out on this feed in season four. So definitely want to watch out for some really interesting conversations coming.

What else have we done? Lots of product updates. If you've been eagle-eyed, you might have noticed we've upgraded our email platform, improved our core platform for savings, the way in which they are managed, the way in which they're redeemed and requested from people. And we're getting a lot more requests. The site traffic of Glad is improving. Part of that, I think, is because of our SEO improvements we've done this season. We've introduced quite a lot of AI to help. We are a small team. We don't need lots and lots of people to help us do this. What we need are lots and lots of people contributing, but we're using AI to help and it's driving massive efficiencies. So there's lots of benefits we've had of leveraging AI this season. And we've built some more software to allow us to calculate that savings value. So lots of stuff, lots of improvements behind the scenes on product. And you'll start to see a lot of that come through as we work through season four.

So thinking of season four, we've just wrapped three. That means we immediately roll into four. Season four runs from the first of October until the end of December. And of course, the goal is simply to make the totaliser, make the impact from season four as large as we possibly can.

And the question you ought to be asking is, well, how might we do that? Well, our focus in season three was on introducing brands and savings to increase the value of the product, to answer that question, what's in it for me? And whilst we continue to do that during season four, we believe we've cracked that from the perspective of we've got inbound brands. They're coming to us. They like what we're doing. They want to be part of this community. So you're going to see more and more brands coming. So we'll continue to do that, of course.

But what we'll also do in season four is validate our assumptions that Glad is a really good...a really good mechanism for businesses. And our particular target in season four are service-based businesses. So businesses that are using their brain power, their talent, their team to deliver a service. Think of marketing agencies, think of recruitment businesses, think of consultancies, all sorts of different businesses.

The value of their business is predicated on the quality of their team and therefore they really need to look after their team. And most of the time, they're in a really commoditized market. That means they're just competing with lots of other people and they need to stand out. We think Glad gives them a really simple two for one benefit. They get the benefit of...helping to clean up the atmosphere. So whilst they're contributing to saving the planet, their employees get the savings on their everyday essentials and nice to haves. So it's a simple mechanism, it's an affordable cost and it gives them two benefits. And we're gonna be doubling down in season four and trying to validate that. Okay, that's what we're up to season four.

And I think that's all we've got time for this week really. As always, if you're a member, thank you. Thank you for being part of this growing community. And if you're not, but you're interested, but for whatever reason, not quite ready to commit to being a member, you can still be part of this family. We really want people to engage in what we're doing. We want this movement to grow and...what we recognised recently was you don't necessarily have to contribute to be part of this. If you support what we're doing, if you're an advocate for it, naturally we've got a little name for you. You can become a Gladvocate And the Gladvocate is entirely free, dead easy to do. You just simply go to gladclimate.com/gladvocate and sign up, give us your email address. We will contact you on a regular basis with these updates so you can follow along and you can see the progress we're making. And if I get my way, if we're successful, there'll be some incentives for you guys as Gladvocates as well as for our paid up members that we cheekily like to call Gladiators. So there we go, that's it for me.

Until next time, stay Glad.