Sparkles Becomes First Climate Positive Entity on the Songbird Network

Since being founded on 7 March 2021, Sparkles, the first open NFT marketplace ‘built by the community, for the community’ for all NFTs on Songbird (and later Flare Network), has embraced certain values at its core.

Included in these core values are environmental and charitable causes. These include ambitious plans to become carbon neutral by 2030.

These core values are part of our goal to make the world a better place, one NFT at a time.

Sparkles Becomes Climate Positive

Sparkles’ fundamental core values are a result of us being acutely aware of the importance of our social responsibility.

As a result, Sparkles became a proud Supporter and Signatory of the Crypto Climate Accord (CCA) in 2021. As part of becoming a CCA Signatory, Sparkles pledged to achieve net-zero emissions (becoming carbon neutral) by 2030.

Whilst recognizing the importance of this pledge, Sparkles still felt we could do more.

Sparkles is delighted to announce that, not only have we already reached the important target of becoming carbon neutral by 2030, but we have gone one step further by surpassing carbon neutrality and becoming the first climate positive entity on the Songbird Network and the first climate positive NFT marketplace in the world.

Sparkles has not only reduced our environmental impact but have eliminated our environmental impact by becoming climate positive… all within our first year.

A recent audit of Sparkles’ energy consumption by SCB, a global low carbon commodity firm whose mission is to promote the adoption of a low carbon future, put our carbon emissions at approximately 32kg at the time of review.

Additionally, Songbird transactions were calculated at the same emission level as those on the Polygon blockchain, which is approximately 0.003kg per transaction rounded up (it should be noted that official transaction emissions are yet to be provided for Songbird).

At the time of writing, Sparkles has had approximately 6,500 transactions, rounded up, which equates to 19.5kg of emissions.

Combining the transactions (19.5kg) and the energy consumption (32kg), Sparkles’ carbon emissions amount to 51.5kg CO2. However, we would rather overestimate, so for the purposes of this article, carbon emissions are being rounded up to 100kg.

Following the review, Sparkles worked with SCB in offsetting our carbon emissions by purchasing 375 tonnes of carbon credits, making Sparkles climate positive to the effect of 374.9 tonnes of carbon emissions at the time of writing.

Additionally, Sparkles worked with SCB and Toucan to retire the carbon credits using Toucan’s Carbon Bridge Protocol on Polygon, becoming the first crypto market participant to retire carbon credits on-chain. This enabled Sparkles to not only fulfil but surpass, by a significant margin, our pledge to the Crypto Climate Accord by utilizing blockchain technology.

Sparkles will produce a future article detailing the carbon credits, the positive impact these have had on the environment and on people, in addition to how we utilized blockchain technology and on-chain retirements with SCB and Toucan.

Sparkles would also like to take this opportunity to recap on some of the other notable steps we have taken in living up to our core values.

Our First Charity Partner — GiveWell

Charitable causes have always been important to Sparkles from the very beginning. As such, our first charity partnership with GiveWell was announced back in October 2021.

You can read more on Sparkles’ partnership with GiveWell here.

Sparkles Becomes a Signatory of the Crypto Climate Accord

Along with moving towards fulfilling our core value of charity, Sparkles made steps to fulfil one of our other core values of making a positive environmental impact.

In November 2021, Sparkles announced that it had become a Supporter and Accord Signatory of the Crypto Climate Accord (CCA), along with other prominent and key entities of the crypto-sphere and blockchain industry.

As a Supporter and Accord Signatory of the CCA, Sparkles took the step of publicly announcing that we would “achieve net-zero emissions from electricity consumption associated to [our] respective crypto-related operations by 2030”, essentially meaning we pledged to become carbon neutral.

However, Sparkles is pleased to have taken this a step further by becoming not only carbon neutral, but climate positive, 8 years ahead of what we pledged.

You can read more about Sparkles becoming a CCA Supporter and Accord Signatory here

Sparkles Plants 9,999 Trees

As part of the launch of the Sparkles Genesis Collection NFTs, we pledged to plant one tree for every NFT minted as part of our drive towards improving the environment.

After a successful NFT drop of the Sparkles Genesis Collection selling out in 20 minutes, Sparkles announced in December 2021 that we had planted 9,999 trees with One Tree Planted as part of our commitment to the CCA and were the first project built on Songbird to do so, resulting in other projects now following suit of our initiative in aspiring to have a positive effect on the environment.

Sparkles is also pleased to see other projects on the Songbird network following our lead in planting trees in the wake of successful NFT mints in order to make a positive impact on the environment.

Sparkles Makes Donation to SongBird Charity

In addition to Sparkles’ pledge to plant one tree per NFT minted from the Sparkles Genesis Collection, we also pledged to use $SGB to help wild birds with a $10,000 donation to SongBird Survival.

In December 2021 Sparkles announced the fulfilment of this pledge toward both environmental and charitable causes.

The Future of Sparkles

This is just the beginning of Sparkles’ journey as we look forward to continuing working with our current, and future, community members and partners.

Thank you to everyone who has been a part of this wonderful journey together so far.

We cannot wait to make the world a better place, one NFT at a time.

About Sparkles

Sparkles is the 1st open NFT marketplace on the Flare and Songbird Network.
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