About our impact
Our brands and platforms enable secondhand trade, and help grow the circular economy.
Find out more about how we’re building a more sustainable world through trade.
Sustainability and OLX
At OLX Group, we unlock hidden value in the world’s limited resources. Our platforms and brands facilitate trade across a wide range of categories of products and services including secondhand goods and vehicles, while helping people get the most of their time and budgets when finding a place to live, getting hired for their skills, or finding a local service provider.
Our mission is to make the most of what already exists in the world. We know by now that the world’s current system of consumption is not sustainable. To disrupt the current linear system of take-make-dispose we want to shift as many people as possible to a more sustainable (circular) way of consumption.
We believe we have an important role to play to help shift the current consumption system and stimulate reuse globally. But we are intentional about doing more.
Specifically, our sustainability focus areas are threefold:
While our platforms already facilitate reuse (second and third lives for household goods and vehicles), we are taking steps to extend the role we play into refurbishment and recycle phases.
Notably, in our OLX Autos cars transaction business, in 2022 we will kick off a pilot program in India to unlock value of “end of life” vehicles through efficiently sourcing cars that have reached the end of their natural lives, distributing them to best-in-class recycling operations, while paying a fair price to the vehicle owner.
In Poland, our OLX team is partnering with the national postal service to collect e-waste (phones, tablets, laptops) to efficiently collect and recycle the metals and raw materials and return them back into the supply chain.
We have invested into Cashify, India’s leading electronics refurbishment company, who delivers refurbished phones with warranties to consumers to bring high-quality devices to consumers while reducing overall demand for new production.
These are but a few of the experiments that our teams are undertaking as we build new business models which bring value and offer multiple circular solutions to our customers.
Impact on the climate
While we have a clear role within a circular economy, we also want to walk the talk to mitigate our own climate impact through our operations and supply chain. There are two ways we are approaching our goal to measurably reduce our impact on climate.
Operational impact
We proactively measure our own consumption (so-called Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions) that result from our direct operations. Teams of employee “green teams” in each of our markets hunt for ways to reduce unnecessary emissions, while shifting local energy purchases to renewables whenever possible.
For the second year in a row, we are carbon neutral in our operations purchasing carbon offsets to mitigate the impact of our current operations. Next step is to cement science based targets to reach Net Zero emissions.
Supply chain impact
We are also measuring our Scope 3 emissions that result from the consumption of services from third parties (notably cloud services for our data, employee commuting habits and travel). Our tech team has identified wins in reducing the carbon footprint of our cloud services through strategic hosting of services in locations with better access to renewable energy, and improved efficiencies in the ways we store and process data.
Consumers
A massive contributor to climate impact is through the tens of millions of consumers who utilise our platforms every day. With the help of neutral third parties, we’ve calculated the climate impact of purchases made on OLX and other platforms that result from extending the lives of existing products as a substitute for buying new.
This is the third year we’ve published the OLX Impact Report. To find out more about the massive contribution that results from millions of actions by our customers, click here or scroll down the page.
Our third priority is engaging and unleashing the innovation and passion of our people. Making progress on sustainability is an internal partnership between a small central team in our headquarters with our many employees worldwide who have skill, passion, and ambition to build a company that is making a positive contribution to a more sustainable world.
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- We have green teams in more than 17 countries looking for ways (big and small) to measurably reduce our carbon footprint
- We’ve launched a Sustainability Seed Fund to provide seed capital to test and learn on topics that relate to driving the circular economy or reducing our climate impact
- We helped orchestrate a sustainability hackathon to source new ideas and solicit wins from our people on the ground.
More impact
Sustainability is much more than the three core focus areas outlined above. We are also very proud of work done and commitment to other important topics:
Trust and safety (including privacy and data quality)
Care to join us and help us build toward a more sustainable future? Please browse open jobs today.
Read the Impact Report
Our company’s purpose is to build a more sustainable world through trade. This means getting more out of everything around us, and maximising the usefulness of the world’s limited resources.