Sonder Home Care takes part in digital sustainability project

Sonder Home Care recently took part in a sustainability project as part of the Association for Project Management Challenge 2026, working with a group of early career professionals known as the Net Zero Heroes.

The project focused on digital decarbonisation. This means looking at the carbon impact of websites, files and stored data, and finding ways to make digital spaces more energy efficient.

For us, this was a valuable reminder that sustainability is not only about the changes people can see. It can also be about the smaller work happening behind the scenes, including how a website is built, managed and maintained.

As part of the project, the team reviewed our website and helped make the image files more efficient, without changing the content, layout or look of the site. They also found a way for future uploaded images to be handled in a more efficient web format automatically, which means this improvement can continue without us needing to manually change every file before uploading.

The results showed a clear impact. The final technical report found a 22% reduction in CO2 emissions produced by the website, equal to a reduction of 67,140g of CO2. It also marked 100% of our webpages as optimised for sustainability.

To help put this into context, the report compared the saving to planting over 30 trees, a flight from London to Gibraltar, driving a gasoline truck from London to Paris over seven times, or 157,560 charges of the average smartphone.

As well as reducing the digital carbon footprint of the website, the changes also help the site run more efficiently. Smaller files can support faster loading pages, improve the experience for people using the website, and may also help with search engine performance.

This project has helped us think about sustainability in a way we had not fully considered before. As a care provider, our focus is always on people, but we also recognise the importance of making thoughtful choices in the wider way we work.

We are grateful to the Net Zero Heroes for their time, knowledge and support throughout the project. Their work helped us make a practical improvement to our website and gave us a clearer understanding of how digital sustainability can form part of our wider responsibility as an organisation.

We were also pleased to hear that the Net Zero Heroes achieved second place in the APM Challenge and received a Highly Commended award in recognition of the effort and impact of their work!