Environmental Responsibility Policy

"bee Charity" Verein (“BeeCharity”, “we”, “us”, “our”) is a Swiss association (Verein) with its seat in Dübendorf, Canton of Zurich, registered in the Commercial Register Office of the Canton of Zurich under UID CHE-457.076.818. Environmental protection is at the very core of our mission: our short-term environmental projects — including the proposed Uluwatu Coast Cleanup in Bali, Indonesia, and the Phuket Coast Cleanup in Thailand — exist to remove waste from the natural environment and to help communities protect the coastlines they depend on.

An organisation that asks the public to support environmental action must hold itself to a high environmental standard in its own operations. The purpose of this Environmental Responsibility Policy is therefore twofold: to set out how we minimise the environmental impact of running BeeCharity, and to define the environmental standards we apply when we design and deliver our projects on the ground, so that the way we work never undermines the good we are trying to do.

This policy explains the principles that guide us, how we seek to operate sustainably, how we manage waste, travel and procurement, how we approach carbon reduction, and the specific standards that govern our beach cleanup projects. It also describes how we monitor and report on our environmental performance honestly. It was formally adopted by the board and is published in the spirit of transparency; it describes the standards we hold ourselves to.

Our approach to environmental responsibility is guided by a set of principles that apply both to how we run the organisation and to how we deliver our projects:

These principles connect directly to the commitment against “greenwashing” in our Responsible Fundraising Policy: just as we will not overstate the environmental benefit of our work in our appeals, we will not overstate the greenness of our own operations. Honesty about our limits is itself an environmental principle for us.

• Do no harm — our activities, including our cleanups, must not cause greater environmental damage than they prevent; protecting habitats and wildlife always comes first.
• Prevention before cure — we prioritise reducing waste and impact at source over dealing with it afterwards, and we use our projects to raise awareness of prevention.
• Responsible disposal — waste we collect or generate is separated and transferred to responsible handlers wherever operationally possible, never dumped or burned uncontrolled.
• Proportionality and honesty — we are a small organisation with limited resources, and we take practical, proportionate steps rather than making claims we cannot substantiate.
• Local stewardship — we work with local partners and communities so that environmental benefits are appropriate to the place and can be sustained after we leave.
• Continuous improvement — we learn from each project and each year of operation, and we strengthen our environmental practices as we grow.

BeeCharity is currently a lean, largely volunteer-run association without a physical office or significant infrastructure, and we regard this simplicity as an environmental advantage that we wish to preserve as we grow. We operate primarily digitally, holding meetings and coordinating our work remotely wherever possible, which avoids the emissions and resource use associated with premises and commuting.

In our day-to-day operations we seek to minimise consumption of energy, paper and physical materials: we favour digital documents and records over printing, we avoid unnecessary physical mailings, and we choose digital tools and service providers that are reputable and, where we can tell, reasonably energy-conscious in how they host and deliver their services. Where we do use equipment, we aim to use it for as long as possible, to maintain and reuse rather than replace, and to dispose of electronic equipment responsibly at the end of its life.

As the organisation grows — for example if we take on premises, employees or larger events — we will develop our sustainable-operations practices accordingly, considering matters such as energy sourcing, sustainable office supplies and the environmental performance of any suppliers we rely on. Our aim is that operational growth should not come at a disproportionate environmental cost, and that the resources entrusted to us by donors are used efficiently and with care for the planet.

Waste is central to what we do, in two distinct senses: the waste we help remove from the environment through our cleanup projects, and the waste we generate through our own operations and activities. We take both seriously.

In our own operations we apply the familiar hierarchy of reduce, reuse, recycle: we first seek to avoid generating waste at all, then to reuse what we can, and only then to recycle or dispose of what remains, always preferring responsible routes over landfill or incineration. We minimise single-use items, particularly single-use plastics, in anything we organise, and we ask the partners and volunteers who work with us to do the same.

In our cleanup projects, responsible handling of the material we collect is a defining standard, not an afterthought. As set out in our project plans for Uluwatu and Phuket, collected waste is separated and, where operationally possible, categorised, weighed, and transferred to responsible waste handlers, with recycling and safe disposal prioritised over uncontrolled dumping or burning. We confirm that adequate and responsible disposal capacity exists before collection begins, so that waste removed from a beach is genuinely dealt with rather than simply moved. Recording collected waste by weight also gives us an honest, evidenced measure of impact to report to our supporters.

Travel is one of the more significant environmental impacts associated with an organisation whose projects take place internationally — our coastal cleanups are proposed for Bali and Phuket, far from our Swiss base — and we approach it thoughtfully and honestly. We recognise the tension between delivering environmental projects overseas and the emissions that travel to them can involve, and we do not pretend it away.

Our first principle is to avoid unnecessary travel altogether. We coordinate our work remotely wherever possible, we rely on local delivery partners and local volunteers to carry out project activities on the ground rather than flying people in unnecessarily, and we design our projects so that the people best placed to act are those already in the community. This local-first model is better for the environment as well as for the sustainability and legitimacy of our work.

Where travel is genuinely necessary, we seek to keep it to a minimum, to combine purposes into fewer trips, and to choose lower-impact options — such as trains rather than flights over shorter distances, and public or shared transport locally — where they are practical. For our overseas projects, we favour recruiting and empowering local participants over long-haul travel by our own people. As our capacity allows, we will consider proportionate ways to account for and reduce the emissions associated with essential travel, while being careful not to overstate any offsetting we may undertake.

What we buy, and who we buy it from, has an environmental footprint, and we try to make procurement decisions that are consistent with our environmental purpose. This applies to the equipment and provisions we purchase for our cleanup projects — such as waste-collection tools, protective equipment, and volunteer provisions — as well as to the goods and services we use to run the organisation.

Where practical, we favour durable, reusable and repairable items over disposable ones, we avoid unnecessary packaging and single-use plastics, and we choose products and suppliers with better environmental credentials when they are available and affordable. For volunteer provisions at events, for example, we seek to avoid single-use plastic bottles and packaging in favour of more sustainable alternatives, mindful that a cleanup should not generate the very waste it aims to remove.

These environmental considerations sit alongside the fairness, value-for-money and integrity requirements of our Anti-Fraud, Bribery and Corruption Policy: we balance environmental preference with responsible stewardship of donated funds, and we are honest that cost and local availability, especially in the overseas locations where our projects take place, sometimes constrain the choices realistically open to us. Where we work with suppliers and partners, we encourage them to share our environmental values, consistent with our Partner Due Diligence Policy.

We are committed to understanding and reducing the carbon footprint associated with our work, in a way that is proportionate to our size and honest about what a small organisation can realistically achieve. We would rather take genuine, modest steps and describe them accurately than make grand carbon claims we cannot stand behind.

Our principal sources of emissions are travel to and from project locations and the digital services we use; our low-infrastructure, remote-first way of operating already keeps many other sources low. Our strategy for reducing carbon therefore focuses first on avoidance and efficiency: minimising travel through a local-first delivery model, choosing lower-impact transport where travel is essential, using digital tools efficiently, and keeping equipment in service for as long as possible. Reduction at source is always our priority over compensation.

We are deliberately cautious about offsetting and about terms such as “carbon neutral”. In line with the anti-greenwashing commitment in our Responsible Fundraising Policy, we will not describe ourselves or our projects as carbon neutral unless we can genuinely justify it, and if we ever purchase carbon offsets we will be transparent about their nature and limitations rather than using them to imply that emissions have simply disappeared. As our capacity grows, we intend to develop a more structured approach to measuring and reducing our emissions, and this policy will be updated to reflect that.

Our coastal cleanup projects — the proposed Uluwatu Coast Cleanup in Bali and the Phuket Coast Cleanup in Thailand — are the most direct expression of our environmental mission, and we hold them to specific environmental standards so that they deliver genuine benefit without unintended harm. In delivering a cleanup, we commit to:

These standards ensure that a BeeCharity cleanup genuinely improves the environment it touches, that collected waste is truly dealt with rather than displaced, and that we can report our impact with integrity. They also reflect our respect for the local communities and ecosystems that host our projects.

• Confirm the cleanup site, permissions and any environmental requirements with local partners and authorities before we begin, and complete a baseline assessment of the site.
• Protect habitats and wildlife during the cleanup — for example nesting areas, vegetation and living organisms — and instruct volunteers to remove waste, not living things, and to avoid disturbing sensitive areas.
• Separate and, where operationally possible, categorise and weigh the material collected, so that impact is measured honestly and recyclable material is diverted from disposal.
• Confirm responsible disposal and recycling routes in advance, and transfer collected waste to responsible handlers, never leaving it, dumping it uncontrolled, or burning it.
• Provide volunteers with appropriate safety briefing and protective equipment, consistent with our Volunteer Policy and health-and-safety duties, since a safe cleanup is part of a responsible one.
• Use the cleanup to raise local awareness of waste prevention, so that the benefit extends beyond the material removed on the day.
• Publish a transparent post-project impact report, including waste collected by weight and approved before-and-after evidence, so supporters can see the real environmental outcome.

We monitor our environmental performance so that our commitments are real and measurable rather than merely aspirational, keeping our monitoring proportionate to our size and to the nature of each activity. Monitoring covers both our own operational impact and the environmental outcomes and conduct of our projects.

For our projects, monitoring is built into the way we deliver them: we assess sites before we begin, we record the quantity of waste collected by weight and, where possible, its composition, we check that collected material is transferred to responsible handlers, and we watch for any unintended environmental effects so that we can adjust our approach. This project-level monitoring feeds directly into the impact reports we publish and connects to the wider transparency and results-tracking described across our project pages.

For our own operations, we keep our environmental practices — such as travel, procurement and waste — under review, and we reflect on where we can reasonably do better. The board has overall responsibility for environmental performance and considers what our monitoring tells us. Where monitoring reveals a shortcoming or a better way of working, we act on it, treating environmental responsibility as a process of continuous improvement rather than a fixed achievement.

Transparent reporting is central to how BeeCharity operates, and it applies fully to our environmental performance. We are committed to reporting the environmental outcomes of our projects honestly and in evidenced terms, and to being open about the limits of what we have achieved.

For each cleanup project, we publish a post-project impact report that sets out what was done, the waste collected by weight, and approved before-and-after evidence, alongside a transparent account of how funds were spent, consistent with our Donation and Refund and Responsible Fundraising policies. We distinguish clearly between results we have actually achieved and outcomes we still hope to achieve, and we avoid vague or exaggerated environmental claims, in line with our anti-greenwashing commitment. Where a project is still in preparation — as our Uluwatu and Phuket cleanups currently are — we say so plainly rather than implying results that do not yet exist.

Over time, and as our capacity grows, we intend to report more fully on the environmental impact of our own operations as well as our projects. Any environmental information we publish is subject to the same standards of accuracy that govern all our public communications, and any personal data involved in gathering or publishing it — for example in project media — is handled in accordance with our Privacy and Photography, Media and Consent policies.

This policy was formally adopted by the board and is reviewed at least annually, or sooner if there is a relevant change in Swiss or applicable local law, in recognised environmental good practice, or in the nature and scale of our activities and projects. As BeeCharity grows and delivers more projects, we will strengthen both our operational environmental practices and our project standards, and this policy will be updated to reflect that.

Any material change to this policy is approved under our joint signing authority, with two authorised representatives acting together. The version and status shown at the top of this page reflect its current standing as a policy formally adopted by the board, and we will update the version history when it is adopted or amended. We welcome suggestions from our community, partners and supporters on how we can reduce our environmental impact and improve the environmental quality of our work.

If you have any question about this policy, if you would like to suggest a way for us to reduce our environmental impact, or if you would like to get involved in one of our environmental projects, please contact us and we will be glad to help.

Environmental responsibility and projects: beecharity1@gmail.com

Volunteering on a cleanup: beecharity1@gmail.com

Complaints: beecharity1@gmail.com

Postal address: "bee Charity" Verein, c/o Jasmin Semra Gabrielli, Bahnhofstrasse 33, 8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland