This week’s Glad Tidings comes with a big milestone - together we’ve now removed over 50,000 kg of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. That’s 50 tonnes of legacy pollution cleaned up thanks to the contributions of our growing community.

In this episode, Ben takes us outdoors (flight path and all!) to share the latest updates. Here’s what you’ll hear about:

• The story behind our Climate Saver Card and how it works

• New brands joining the platform, including KinKind and VO

• A behind-the-scenes visit to our carbon removal partner Restord, who are turning waste into biochar

• How we decide which brands make it onto Glad through our new Partner Charter and community votes

We’re still early in the journey, but crossing this milestone shows what’s possible when people come together to take climate action in a simple, rewarding way.

Watch Episode #10 now

Links

Watch on Youtube and Spotify and listen on Apple Podcasts.

Transcript:

Ben (00:02.498)

Hi everyone, my name's Ben Wynn and this is Glad Tidings, a weekly update on the progress we're making as a community towards cleaning up the atmosphere. Now, if you're a regular listener and watcher to Glad Tidings, you might realize things are a little bit different this week. First of all, I'm not with my usual sidekick, James, my co-founder. James is off gallivanting, so I thought I'd try something a little bit different. And so this week, this is our first Glad Tidings from out...in the atmosphere. We're all about trying to clean up the atmosphere. I figured it made sense to talk to you from outdoors. So don't worry, I've not been lost my home. I've not been kicked out into the woods. I just thought this would be a nice, something a bit different to do. So what have we got for you this week? Well, actually we've got some big news. We've got a milestone in the Totalizer. We've got some great brands added. But what I've also got for you is a quick recap because I realized. There's not only a lot of you that are new to Glad and to the Glad community, but also a lot of you joined before we introduced the Climate Saver card. So I thought it'd be worthwhile just explaining what that is and the progress we've made with that as well. what I should say is I am completely new to outside broadcasting and I've put myself in a lovely spot right underneath a flight path. So hopefully I'll be able to edit that out later, but we'll see how we go.

Okay, so Let's start with the totalizer. So The amount of greenhouse gas we've removed from the atmosphere has hit a real milestone number this week, which is wonderful. We're at 50,340 kilograms. So that's 50 tons. Now, I know that in the grand scheme of things, that's negligible because we've got to remove gigatons, billions of tons from the atmosphere. But we had to start somewhere and 50,000 kilograms has come from you guys, from our community, from the contributions you're making, from your membership fees. And in my book, that's a pretty good start. We're in a month into our third season, season three, and the overall total so far for Glad contributions, 50,340 kilograms. I am pretty proud of you guys, so thank you.

Next news for you is also really exciting. We've been shortlisted for an award. So that's... really good because it tells us that other people recognise what we're doing, other people think this is good idea, so it's not just us, it's not just us as a community that thinks Glad's good, other people do too. So we've been shortlisted for the 2025 Startup Innovation Awards and the winners for that are to be announced soon. So I have my fingers crossed, I hope you do too. Cross your toes, your fingers and keep them crossed for about a week and hopefully we'll have some good news for you.

Following that. What else has been going on? Yeah, so I said I'd give you an update on what the climate saver card was and I just think a two minute explainer would be useful. So a lot of you that listen to this and watch this joined Glad in our first two seasons where we asked you to pay a monthly membership fee or a fee per season and you did because you believe in what we're doing, you believe that we all need to contribute to cleaning up the atmosphere.

But the overwhelming feedback that we got from the community and people we've been speaking with, business leaders, individuals, really boils down to this. What's in it for me? Why should I contribute? And if I do, what do I get in return in the short term? So what we've done is introduce what we call the Climate Saver Card. So it's a really, really simple concept. We know that the majority of people want to help tackle climate change, but they need an incentive, they need something for them now. And at the same time, we know that businesses use their marketing budgets to attract new customers and retain existing customers. So really what we're doing is putting those two things together. We take the marketing budget from a brand to provide an offer or a saving to a member of Glad and they pay their monthly membership fee and that goes to the climate pot. We then deploy the climate pot, clean up the atmosphere. So that when I talk to you in beautiful places like this, the atmosphere and the air is a little bit cleaner. That's the whole premise. So what progress have we made? Well, so far on the platform, we have brands that you may be familiar with, like the online florist, Blooming Wild, the tissue business, Who Gives a Crap? We've got an apparel business, men's t-shirts, sweatshirts, that kind of thing called Sutsu, and a fantastic business, worn by Louis the Theroux no less, but there you go.

And this week we've added a couple more brands that you may be familiar with, you may not. So a brand called KinKind has been added to the platform. They're giving 20 % off to Glad members and they do 100 % plastic free refillable deodorants. So solid deodorants, a real kind of innovation in that space. And they're giving a really healthy 20 % off to Glad members, which is wonderful.

We've also added a business called VO, which is vegan organic. That's an apparel business they do, I'm have to read it to you, PETA approved, vegan, cruelty-free, made to order fashion. So if you're into that and they do amazing artwork on their t-shirts and their clothing, go check it out and you get 10 % off if you are a Glad member. So those two added this week. There are more to be added. We're just going through the process of working with the brands sorting out the details and they'll be live very soon. And as you know, if you're a Glad member, it's you guys that get to choose the brands. So it's your votes on a weekly basis. And we've got more, I think we've got three more lined up for this coming Monday. And the Happy Mondays email will ask you to vote. Please do contribute because it really does shape how Glad evolves.

What else have we been up to? Well, I went for a bit of a road trip. I went down to Cornwall. And I went to see one of our carbon removal providers, one of our partners. It's a business called Restord and they do biochar. Now I'm gonna save what does all of that mean, what is biochar for the video that we produced when we went down there. We went to see Tom, the founder of Restord and we had the day in the life. We saw the end to end process of making biochar. An absolutely fascinating day covered in muck as biochar is like a charcoal. So very mucky, muck and bullets day. And a little bit like today, it's an outdoor thing. And of course it's the British summer. So it threw it down. But yeah, really insightful, really, really helpful and just really appreciative to Tom as well. So that I'm looking forward to sharing with you in due course.

What else did I want to share? I think that's about it this week.

What we always talk about when we do this internally is the what went well, so there's quite a lot that went well. I don't want to finish on a negative note, but we always do the even better ifs as well. And so even better if, I would have loved to have got you some more brands, the ones that are coming, I think you'd be really excited about. I can't mention them until they go live, just in case things go wrong, but really excited to have some brands, some real high street names that will be added to the platform soon. So yeah, that's... what's coming up next week.

Yes, I know I was going to tell you, the partner review process. So, it's you guys that vote on this. When we want to add brands to the site, what we've done lots of work on this week is all around our Partner Charter. And so what we figured was really important is not just to get any old saving, because that's not what Glad's all about. We want to get the right brands and the right offers, the right savings. And to do that, we had to define a framework. And so we've put a lot of effort into this over the last couple of weeks. We call it the brand evaluation framework. There's three stages to it. The first is a fairly easy and obvious one. It's the sectors and categories and types of businesses we won't work with. So think of fast fashion, think of fossil fuel businesses, think of gambling, gaming, that kind of thing. So we choose not to work with those categories of business.

Then we need to evaluate, and we do that through a Partner Charter. So it's really a set of rules that we use internally to decide whether we think this brand aligns with our values and whether we think it would be appropriate to then put to the third stage. So that's really like our due diligence. The third stage is then when we get you guys to be involved. And we do that through the vote.

We do a happy Mondays email, we get you to evaluate each brand, provide your own feedback. And what we're looking for there is a yes, no, do you think this fits for the Glad community? It's not a would you want this saving because you've got to think about it from the perspective of the whole community. But also are you aware of any red flags? Are there any reasons you can think of why we shouldn't use this brand? And so we've put a lot of effort into that. It's gonna get better over time.

We'll get more efficient and more rigorous. But right now we're working predominantly with certified B Corps, which is wonderful to have anyway. And yeah, if you wanna check that out, you can go to the website. It's at, well, I'll tell you what, I don't know the link. I'll put the link in the notes after this and you can check that out directly. But yeah, that's about it for now. Until next time, until hopefully next week. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you so much for being a part of Glad. We're really glad that you're following along.

If you are, remember, thank you so much. And if not, yeah, it's about time. Come on, let's join. Let's do this. Let's clean up the atmosphere.

Thanks a lot.