sustainability

Reduction of our collective carbon emissions

Travel

To reduce our carbon emissions, we encourage our lecturers to use the Zürich local transportation system over private vehicles (e.g. taxis) by not reimbursing them for the latter mode of transportation unless absolutely necessary. For those travelling within Europe or Switzerland, we recommend the usage of ground transportation (trains and buses) over air travel whenever feasible.

For each of our participants and lecturers, we gather their mode of transportation and travel kilometers to and from Zürich to calculate our incurred emissions. We base our calculations on the data published in 2022 by the Umweltbundesamt, the environment agency of the German government. They assume 31 g/CO2/km per person for long-distance train and bus travel and 238 g/CO2/km per person for air travel (1). Our flight emission calculations are cross-checked e.g. with the atmosfair calculator.

With this information, we are able to offset the carbon emissions we incur via the United Nation’s carbon offset platform, ensuring our full payment goes towards the selected project. All of the projects are Clean Development Mechanism projects, established by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, taking place in low resource countries with the aim of contributing to their sustainable development.

Vegetarian and vegan food partners

A vegetarian diet reduces dietary carbon emissions by up to 55%, a vegan diet by up to 70%, compared to a high meat eating diet (2). Our group-food-for-thought gatherings take place at Hiltl, the world’s first vegetarian restaurant (3). The daily meals and snacks throughout the Bumblekite week are provided by Klara’s kitchen and sv-group. Klara’s Kitchen offers only vegetarian, mostly vegan food. Sv-group has a rich offering of vegetarian and vegan products.

 

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Reduction of the waste

Usage of reusable mugs and water bottles

We recommend our participants to bring their reusable mugs when starting their journey to Zürich. Both of our refreshment partners, Klara’s kitchen and sv-group, allow the usage of travel mugs, minimising the amount of one time usage cups. Zürich has excellent drinking water (4). By sharing this information, e.g. in our FAQs and by including a reusable water bottle as an item on our “Participant packing list”, we aim to reduce the amount of plastic waste being produced.

Usage of stationery

Our welcome packages are minimal, including only the food vouchers, Bumblekite postcards and stickers, a handwritten welcome note and our paper-based nametags. All schedules and lecture materials are only available in a digital format.

We encourage closed laptops during our lectures and leadership conversations. In situations like this one, where our values of cultivating presence and mindfulness create tension with our sustainability efforts, we discuss internally how to proceed. In the case of stationery, we consciously decided to put paper and pen on the participant packing list instead of including them in our welcome packages, as everyone has their favourite notebook, pen, etc. and we would like to avoid the accumulation of unused products. That being written, we do love thoughtfully crafted and sustainable stationery, so please send your suggestions and share with us your favourites.

Klara’s kitchen is determined to minimise food waste by estimating the need for each menu on a daily basis.

 

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Preference towards local products

The flowers displayed during our Bumblekite week are from Floral Lokal, a partner we intentionally chose because of their aim of obtaining flowers used in their arrangements from within Switzerland, especially during the warm months. This minimises their and our ecological footprint.

 

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Our overall energy consumption

The growing availability of large data sets, the training of increasingly large machine learning models and their associated rising energy costs in many countries have led to an increased number of discussions about energy consumption of AI and related workloads (5). During our hands-on tutorials, dozens of peer-programming pairs run computations simultaneously. We combine a great learning experience with moderate energy consumption by utilising only energy-efficient, shared resources like Google Colab or local laptop CPUs. Shared resources like Google Colab allow for a better computing resource utilisation, as there are no idle computing units waiting only for our participants. It also ensures our tutorials use only the energy and resources that are needed to complete the tasks of the practical session at hand.

ETH Zürich, where our tutorials take place, uses primarily hydropower and almost entirely renewable energy sources (6).

 

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Future directions

We are continuously evolving our sustainability efforts and accompanying data gathering processes. We have included a paragraph about our sustainability efforts in our lessons learned and will continue to do so for our future iterations.