This week’s Glad Tidings comes with a mix of honesty, reflection and a good dose of optimism.

First up, the totaliser hasn’t moved much since last week. As a small team, we’ve been focused on adding more savings to the site - and that’s the key to attracting more members. More members means a bigger Climate Pot, and more greenhouse gases cleaned up. The good news is there’s a strong backlog of brands waiting to join, so we expect the totaliser will rise soon.

We’ve also been out testing the Glad idea with people who don’t know us yet - asking a simple question: What do you think of the Climate Saver Card? Out of 250 responses, over 80% were positive. A quarter loved the idea straight away. The majority were positive but wanted more detail - mainly around two things: how the savings work, and how exactly we clean up the atmosphere. Both are completely fair questions, and we’re working hard to answer them better.

Some of the tougher feedback focused on removals – with people asking why we put so much emphasis there. Ben tackled this head-on, explaining why we believe removals are essential alongside reductions. We, that's all of us collectively, have already made a mess, and it needs cleaning up. Offsets have a poor reputation, but permanent, fast-acting removals are different - they lock greenhouse gases away for centuries, buying us time to switch fully to renewables.

We also admitted we need to improve how we talk about our impact. The totaliser shows kilograms of carbon “removed”, but technically it’s the amount we’ve funded to be removed, not what’s already been physically taken out. These projects take time - like trees growing, or biochar locking carbon away - so it’s important we communicate this with clarity and transparency.

Finally, we cleared up a couple of member questions on brand votes:

• When you vote, there can be a delay before the saving goes live, because both we and the brand need to set things up properly.

• A “no” vote doesn’t automatically block a brand - we look for a majority yes and no red flags. But if you do vote no, please tell us why. You might know something we don’t.

So, while this week’s update began with little movement on the totaliser, it ended with something bigger: a reminder that building Glad is about openness, learning, and moving forward together.

Thanks for being part of the journey.

Watch Episode #13 now

Links

Watch on Youtube and Spotify and listen on Apple Podcasts.

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to Glad Tidings. My name's Ben Wynn and this is the weekly update on the progress we're making as a community towards cleaning up the atmosphere. Now, I'm going to start with some bad news, I'm afraid. We haven't made a great deal of progress since last week on increasing that totaliser, the amount of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas that we've removed from the atmosphere. And the reason for that is we're a small team and we're focused exclusively on building up the savings value in order to attract other members. And it's, remember, it's the members fees that contributes to the climate pot, which is what we deploy to remove the green-esque gas from the atmosphere. So limited progress on the totaliser. But that, I think, will be coming soon because we've got such a great backlog of brands that we're frantically trying to add to the site. So there's good news in there, and I'm expecting that totaliser to grow soon.

And because I know you're all going to be referring Glad to your friends to get them to be members and that way the totaliser will increase. Now, second piece of bad news is for me not you. I've decided to do this outdoors again. We're trying to stick with this as a feature. We started during the summer. I'm not quite sure how it's going to last in winter and today might be the first day that the summer's disappearing on us. So it's just started, to throw it down. Let's hope my iPad has a degree of waterproofness so that I can get to the end of my notes as I'm recording with you. So, coming up today, what I wanted to take you through is just a bit of feedback really, or sentiment analysis from research we've been doing with, well, prospect members, but just people we've been reaching out to. Our approach to that has been to use LinkedIn and to connect with someone that we don't know and to just ask them the question, what do you think to the concept of Glad? Explaining in just two or three sentences what Glad is actually all about introducing the Climate Saver Card. And I wanted to run through the responses we've had, good and bad, and there's a couple of challenges that I want to dig into. And I may, I'm sitting on a log in the woods, but I may end up getting on a soapbox because it does tap into something that I get quite passionate about. And also I want to just go through a couple of member questions. So we've had questions coming in from Glad members. Which I figured it's just worth clarifying and we'll go with you, go through with you.

Okay, so let's start, some sentiment analysis. We have asked so far 250 people. We're continuing to do that, so that number is going to go up. And of those 250 people, none of them know James and I, none of them are aware of the Glad business upfront, they're not people we've approached in advance. We've just asked them that really simple question, 81 % of them have been overall positive about the concept, leaving 19 % negative. And of that 81%, a flat out 25 % just flat out positive. Just love the idea, love the concept straight in, which is wonderful. 56 % however, are positive, this is how we phrased it, positive, but require more info. And the requiring more info really boils down to two things. Tell me more about the savings. Can I really save money each month?

Tell me which brands you have, how do the savings work? How are the brands doing this? Why are they doing this? That kind of more info. And the other side is around, tell me more info about how you're cleaning up the atmosphere, how you're pulling down the greenhouse gas, what do you mean by carbon removals? That kind of territory. Which is completely valid of course on both camps and it led us a few weeks ago to write a couple of blog posts about

How can you save money and how do we clean up the mess? So those are on the site, they're on the blog, you can go to those and read that for yourself if you'd like. What I wanted to do though is just dive into a couple of challenges that we've had from those that are sentiment analysis negative. So remember this is 19 % of 250 people asked so far. So we're really delighted that over 80 % of people think that what we're doing is a good idea. So that's a really positive and encouraging sign.

it's actually much easier, much better, much more beneficial if we can get that negative feedback so we can learn from it and improve. And there's a couple of challenges. The first one that comes out as a theme within that negative feedback is around why focus on removals? Or let's look at it a different way. The way you're describing the challenge of climate change is reduce and remove is too reductive.

Another way it's phrased is, I don't like removals as a concept. They're unproven and they don't work. And I want to just talk around all of that area because I think it's really important that we clarify why we're taking the approach we are, why we believe it has a positive impact, and to clear up what frankly is a lack of misinformation that's abundant in the market. The first thing I to talk on is this idea of I don't like carbon removal because when we hear that what we're generally hearing is people talking about carbon offsets and they've lumped together in their own mind quite possibly in the media they've read carbon offsets, carbon removals being a form of offset and indeed carbon removal is often used as an offset navigate through that we should understand what on earth I mean by an offset and the really simple way to describe that is if as a business you have operated your business right and during the process of doing so you've emitted a certain amount of carbon and even if you're taking every single step you can to reduce your emissions there's probably still some residual left. Hopefully in time as renewables become more more abundant the amount left will be more more negligible. But if there is a remainder, an offset is a mechanism, it's actually a kind financial mechanism to allow you to offset that same amount. The challenge doesn't lie in that mechanism, it lies in a lot of the projects and a lot of the tactics from the project providers and the businesses adopting offsets to do basically the cheapest stuff with questionable additionality. That means

it was probably going to go ahead anyway with questionable durability. That means they might be doing something, but it probably won't last very long. They might be helping the atmosphere, but then the help they've provided, the carbon they've captured might end up just being released back out into the atmosphere. And because of a few bad actors, and as with all things, it's generally the case when it's just a few bad actors, carbon offsets have basically got a poor rap in the market, understandably so. My personal belief is carbon removals is in a different category. And what we're talking about with removals are permanent, fast acting, additional greenhouse gas removals. There's three complicated words in there, permanent. So by that we mean locking away the greenhouse gas for centuries and longer. So it's the capturing of greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere and then locking it away for a long long time. Fast acting being to choose the technologies that act as fast as possible. This is not a fast process. This is going to take time and I want to talk more about the time issue here in a moment. And then the additional, we're only backing projects where carbon is removed, greenhouse gas is removed because of the funding of Glad members. Nnot backing things that have already happened and then making a claim for it because of course that makes no sense we're trying to clean up the mess so why focus on removals? well we believe it's important and the challenge we've had if I quote it to you I'm not going to give you the person's name but I'm going to quote it to you pretty much by every metric the impact cost effectiveness and current feasibility tells us that removals are inferior as a solution to solve the climate crisis. That was the quote. And you know what? I kind of agree. This is the conundrum. It is much better to stop putting stuff into the atmosphere than it is to focus on cleaning it up. But the fundamental point that I believe that person and actually a lot of people that are on the fringes of the climate community or are working in sustainability, a lot of them miss the point that we've already made the mess. This is an and, not an or. It's not an option to just focus on reduction. And it's not an option to just focus on removals. We need both. Now, as a business, as a movement, as a community, we've chosen to focus on removals and I mean just removals. And we're doing that deliberately. Because it's measurable, because it's a problem that needs cleaning up by a community, by all of us globally, not individual actions to go and change. It's not something that I can go and influence, changing my energy provider on behalf of millions of people. Those are actions other people need to do. But as a community, we can all contribute to cleaning up the mess. And the way I think about the mess, the way we...we're thinking about how to describe this. When we heard this challenge was by analogy, and I think a good analogy that's timely, certainly for those here in the UK, is the Birmingham bin crisis. So in the UK, just to set context, there's been a strike and the bins have not been collected in Birmingham for a long, time. Now, imagine you were living with that situation. There's a great big...pile of rubbish on every street corner, the rubbish has not been collected. It smells, it's fetid, it's got rat infestations. And now, hear this. Singularly, the best way in which we could clean up that mess would be to stop putting as much stuff onto the rubbish tip. We should be focusing on people reducing the amount of mess that they create. It makes no sense. The rubbish pile is there, it needs cleaning up.

But here's the thing, those people in Birmingham, as those people across the UK and across a lot of the developed world, are used to their rubbish being cleared up. They live within a society where the rubbish is taken care of. They pay their council taxes and the rubbish gets collected on a weekly or fortnightly basis. It is a problem that's been solved for them. Asking them to reduce the amount of rubbish is a very, very hard thing for them to do. The food they buy comes in lots of packaging. The items they buy comes with lots of cardboard and lots of plastic. So even if they wanted to reduce the amount of rubbish, it's kind of imposed on them. And that's important because that's really quite similar to the carbon dioxide problem. Just by living your daily life, you're emitting carbon because of the infrastructure around you.

So the reduction argument for me, yes you can play your own part and yes you can get your switch to a green energy provider. Yes you can do things like choose greener travel and you can reduce your emissions in that way. But the bigger picture is a more industrial piece. And if you were living next to a fetid load of rubbish that needs cleaning up, do you think you'd probably want it cleared up? Do you think if the pollution we put into the atmosphere stunk in the same way and was on your doorstep and was causing you an eyesore and a problem you would probably want to focus on cleaning it up. I believe you would and the reality is that's what we're all living with. The only real difference is it doesn't smell and you can't see it. and it's up in the atmosphere not right on your doorstep. We believe removals is important and even though it's more expensive, it is more cost effective to focus on reduction. But we need to clean up the mess and unfortunately it's only getting worse because reduction is not happening fast enough. And the only way in which we can get it to be more cost effective is by investing in the technologies that focus on the cleanup. Because once they get to scale, the unit economics, the price will come down and therefore it will become more cost effective. To reject it now because it's more cost effective, to me is a non-starter argument. It's something that we must be investing in now and that's why we choose to do so with Glad. So that's our first challenge on why we focus on removals.

The next challenge that we face is around how much greenhouse gas we've removed and how much we communicate. And on this one, we absolutely hold our hands up. We've not been communicating that correctly. So what we have at the moment as of the time of recording this on our website, we have a statement that says carbon removed and then a number. And that number is quoted in kilograms. That is our totaliser and right now it's about 51,000 kilograms. And as I've said many times, in the grand scheme of things, that's a tiny blip of what's required, but we needed to start somewhere and really our goal is just to drive up that totaliser. The challenge isn't against the kilograms and the quantity, it's against that statement, carbon removed so far. And that is a genuine challenge and we are genuinely incorrect because that's not the case. What we've actually done is generated a climate pot. A pot of money from member fees from both businesses and individuals and then each season we deploy that climate pot to remove carbon. We are supporting solutions and projects that will remove carbon but it takes time. So we take the feedback that we've been mis-communicating that it is not actually carbon removed it is the amount of carbon that will be removed so we've got to work out how to actually communicate that without it becoming a kind of paragraph. But we will work on that, we will improve it, and I'm really, really grateful for that feedback. So that takes me to something that I think is also important to describe, which is time. Because we're cleaning up a mess that has been put up there over generations, and it's going to take time to clean it up. Not only is it a gargantuan problem, and it's...a colossal amount of greenhouse gas that we've put into the atmosphere, cleaning it up is hard and it takes time. And the best way I can describe that to you is to think of a tree. Most people understand what a tree is and most people understand the way in which a tree captures carbon. It's basically that carbon dioxide is its food. That's how it breathes. So It takes carbon out of the atmosphere by absorbing it through photosynthesis and storing it in its trunks, its branches, its roots. That's great, but it takes time. Most people also know that it takes time to grow a tree. And so if you are waiting for a tree to grow for, let's say, 15, 20 years to capture that carbon, it's over that period of time that the carbon is being built up. And so if one said a tree captured 10 units of carbon, depends on the type of tree, the location it is, how long you wait, etc. But let's say 10 units of carbon and you needed to wait 10 years for that, then the carbon is being built up or being captured or sequestered over a period of time. And that's exactly the same as the sort of projects that we support. But then it gets even more detailed. So let's explore a couple of those. I'm going to pick on Biochar to start with. Now, Biochar is an interesting piece. Where that's a solution we support, but it's not actually capturing carbon. Biochar is the sequestration of carbon. So what's happening there is trees, plants, bushes, all sorts of organic matter are doing the capturing of the carbon. They've already grown, they've already captured the carbon. But here's the rub. If you just leave them, let's say out in the wild or in a woodland like this, then over time they decompose they break down and release all of the carbon that they've captured back into the atmosphere. Now that is an entirely organic process. It is kind of meant to happen, but it's not what we want to happen because we're trying to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and not release it back into the atmosphere. And that's where something like biochar comes in. What happens with biochar is you take the, let's pick on branches of a tree, the organic matter, and you use pyrolysis, a process of turning it into biochar, to lock away that carbon for a long, long period of time. So let's say that the tree would have decomposed over 10, maybe 20 years. By converting that tree matter, that organic matter, into biochar, it locks the carbon away for centuries. And that matters a lot because even though in centuries time that carbon might be released again, we're trying to clean up the mess that we're making now. And so the longer we can store it for, the more time we give ourselves to get off the carbon-based fuel drug that we all are living on, switch to a world of renewables, and clean up the atmosphere. Now, in a thousand years, in a hundred years, however long it takes for when that's released.

Yes, that will cause a problem down the line, but this is less about deferring the problem for generations. It's more about buying ourselves time, essentially. That's the situation we're in. So, biochar. That is all about sequestration, but it's not the only type of solution that we back. Let's pick on enhanced rock weathering. Enhanced rock weathering is again an entirely natural process. This is one where the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide that is in the atmosphere interacts with water molecules and converts that into a weak carbonic acid. Now that falls ultimately as rainwater and when it lands on the ground, if it lands on a certain type of rock, a silicate rock, then it takes that carbonic acid and converts the rock into a carbonate.

So you're going to have to remember your GCSE chemistry to really go deeper than this. But it's turning the gas from the atmosphere first into a liquid and then into a solid. And when it's in that solid, it stays in that form for thousands of years. And when the water hits that rock, if you can imagine the surface area of that rock being bigger, so first of all, think of just a bigger rock, then it's going to interact with more surface it's going to have a bigger effect and so what we do is crush that rock into fine particles and spread it over the ground. That radically increases its surface area meaning it acts faster. So enhanced rock weathering does both the capture of the carbon as it turns it into a carbonate, a solid, and the sequestration. It's storing it in that rock for thousands of years. But here's the thing, if in season... where are we? Season 3, let's say we get to whatever, 20,000 kilograms, that is not removed overnight. We're trying to focus on the fastest acting solutions we can find because the longer the carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases left in the atmosphere, the more of a problem we will have. But it isn't an overnight fix. So we are going to take that feedback, we're going to work harder, we're going to communicate better.

Our entire objective is to be completely transparent, open and candid with you. So thank you for that feedback and we'll work harder. So thank you. Okay, next is member questions. And so the first of those comes from a friend of mine from James Taylor, who quite rightly said after I asked you last week, who do you know that runs a business? Who do you know who works in the HR department of a business? Who would...like to empower their team to save money? Who do you think would be interested in what we're doing with Glad? And James quite rightly said, have you got a one-pager, have you got some marketing collateral for us to share? And I didn't, we didn't, and unfortunately we still don't. We've still been entirely focused on adding brands to the site and all I can say is thank you JT, we will get that to you and for others that have raised the very same question.

We will get that out and hopefully you can help us. So thank you for that one. Next is around votes, so voting on brands. And a couple of questions that have come up here, all questions super valid, but ones that I thought were worth just clarifying with you. it's first one is around the delay between when the vote is cast. So today is Tuesday 26th of August 2025 and our intention is to get you a weekly email out, newsletter out today. We'd like to do those on a Monday, we'd like to do it on a happy Monday but yesterday was a happy bank holiday Monday so it's going to be the Tuesday and hopefully you cast your vote in the next 24 hours that's typically what happens. Then there's a delay and the delay between the vote and getting a saving live is simply because we have to work with the brands. We have to do a process, they have to do a process. To get the listing live, we need to approve descriptions, finalize logo, imagery, get the savings code set up within their systems, test it all, and then we can push it live on the Glad website. So it takes a little bit of time, and there's no sort of set time because it's just dependent on our third parties and how quickly they work, etc . But our intention is to get them as live as quickly as possible as we can for you. So if you're in a situation where we've shared the fact that we might have a brand and a saving for you that you're really desperate to buy from, do let us know. We can prioritise these and try and push them through but we do have a backlog we're working through so please be patient at the same time. And then what happens when you vote? So if you vote positively and everyone else does then great the saving will be added to the site.

If you choose to vote negatively and you say, don't think this is a good fit, that doesn't categorically mean that that brand won't be added. What we look for is a majority yes. So from everyone that does cast their vote, if the majority is a yes and, and this is a crucial and, and there are no red flags, then that saving will go live on the website. So if you're casting a negative vote and saying, I don't think this fits, please do tell us why. Because it might be that you're aware of something we're not aware of. We do a pretty diligent due diligence process, but of course we don't expect to know everything, so do tell us. If you cast a No, tell us why. It might be you just don't think it's a fit, and that's just an opinion thing, but it might be you're aware of something we're not, so do help us out with that if you can. Okay, I think that's about it for this week. Yeah, I will leave you there. Thank you.

Thanks again for being a member of Glad. Thank you for contributing. Thank you for helping us clean up the atmosphere and I shall see you next week.

Cheers guys.