Environment

Sustainable Commerce

Adevinta is a champion for sustainable commerce, leading the shift towards circular consumption by enabling re-commerce at scale.

But we know there is more to do to unlock sustainable consumption that benefits our users, our employees, our shareholders and our planet. And as a responsible European business, we recognise the important role we have in enabling this. 

How Adevinta measures environmental progress 

We are committed to managing our environmental impact and calculating, monitoring and reporting our carbon footprint, representing the total amount of GHG emissions our business emits (either directly or indirectly). Adevinta has undergone several changes to its group structure since it was founded in 2019, resulting in many different enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, policies and processes across the Group, often requiring a marketplace- or entity-specific data collection approach. In 2023, we started our vertical transformation programme to centralise our approach, with numerous operational implications that have challenged our GHG data collection.

In order to set 2023 as a baseline for our GHG emissions the following key updates and improvements were made to our GHG reporting in 2023:

• Completeness and consistency – Reviewed Adevinta’s organisational and operational boundaries in line with the GHG protocol, eliminating detected data gaps
• Accuracy – Developed the internal data review process for data completeness and quality
• Transparency – Integrated a data traceability framework
• Relevance – Automated the centralised data collection process, aligned with our organisational transformation
• Organisation – Bi-annual data collection with allocated teams

This is our carbon footprint:

^{1 Market-based Scope 2 has been used in total.
2 Emissions of non-CO2 GHGs have been converted to CO2e using the conversion factors from the IPCC’S Fifth Assessment Report.
3 These figures have been rounded to the nearest whole number.}
For a more detailed information on our methodology to calculate our 2023 Carbon Footprint, please refer to our 2023 Annual Report, pages 86-93

Taking action with offsetting projects

We are committed to transitioning to renewable energy to reduce our GHG emissions. In addition, we are investing in environmental projects to reduce or remove emissions elsewhere (carbon offsetting). Carbon offsetting allows us to compensate for carbon emissions that we are not yet able to reduce, ensuring that we take responsibility for our entire carbon footprint. We understand that investing in voluntary emissions reduction projects is only a temporary solution when it comes to minimising our environmental impact. We continue to prioritise actively reducing our carbon footprint and expect our dependence on offsets to shrink over time.

We first purchased offsets to compensate for our 2021 GHG emissions. In 2023, we purchased 42,938 Gold Standard-verified carbon credits to offset our Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 GHG emissions in 2022.

We select our carbon offsetting programmes based on the following criteria:

• Certification (i.e. Gold Standard certification)
• Additionality (the project would not have gone ahead without our purchase)
• Longevity (i.e. continuity over time)
• Impact (supporting more than one Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and including social components)
• Location (focusing on growth economies)
• Scope (no involvement of renewable energy or industrial project)
• Avoidance of projects that are difficult to assess, such as avoided deforestation

For more information see our 2022 emission offsetting commitments.

Driving sustainability through technology 

The global information and communication technology (ICT) industry contributes an estimated 2%–4% of global CO2e emissions. Adevinta’s marketplaces process a significant volume of data, and the data centres that hold this information consume energy both during the use phase and their manufacturing, which, inevitably, has an environmental impact, forming part of our indirect carbon footprint.

In 2022, our leboncoin green tech team entered several projects for the Sustainable Digital Challenge, an international competition that teaches sustainable design, architecture and code, andhttps://com24.adevinta.staging.acato.nl/brand/leboncoin/ won a gold prize. The team then created a repository of its best practices, prioritising a number for wider adoption across the Group. In 2023, we developed our green tech strategy and OKRs, which have now been presented to our Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO) and will be included in the Group product and technology strategy in 2024.

Green tech initiatives in 2023 included:

• Climate Fresk: To better understand climate change and its global impacts: 159 people attended; 17 individuals trained as facilitators
• Digital Collage: To focus on the environmental footprint of our digital world and the actions we could take to mitigate it: 127 participants; 8 trainers
• Cloud Carbon Footprint tool: Initial setup completed, integrating across all AWS and
• GCP resources and markets, allowing Adevinta’s tech team to closely monitor the estimated carbon emitted by operations
• Sustainable Challenge 2023: A six-month programme, for teams to tackle hands-on issues in their tech stack to reduce environmental footprint