RuntastiCARES – How We Take (Corporate) Social Responsibility

At Runtastic, we believe in giving everybody the chance to live a more aware and active lifestyle, leading to a longer, happier life. Since we have already advanced the active and healthy part of our vision, the time came for us to make the world a better place on an even larger scale.

We volunteer.

As we are a bunch of social people who enjoy hanging out together not only in the office, but also in our free time, we used one of our recent DONIs to combine our new focus with fun: by planning a day together to give back to the community.

Runtastic employees will be granted a day off from work to partake in a project with the SOS Children’s Village Altmünster. This is the local branch of a prominent Austrian NGO focused on supporting children without parental care or in at-risk families. Our team members will use their time to help the local teams with their tasks and have an unforgettable time with the kids living there.

We run for the oceans.

This campaign, initiated in 2016 and expanded through a partnership with adidas and Parley for the Oceans in 2017, became a real movement in 2018. With the goal of raising global awareness, nearly a million people ran over 12 million kilometers to support the fight against marine plastic pollution. It goes without saying that we used every runch (which stands for lunch run), every possible team event, and our evenings after work to run for this good cause (and not just for our personal health).

We avoid plastic. Every day.

What’s the point of creating awareness if you don’t change your own problematic behavior, right? For this reason, Chris (the creative and ethical mastermind behind the scenes), and our entire Runtastic team challenged themselves to reduce their daily plastic usage and underwent a rather radical plastic detox.

While avoiding single-use plastic on a daily basis can be rather tricky for an individual (because literally everything is wrapped in plastic), we implemented a few cheap and easy measures to reduce Runtastic’s plastic footprint.

The entire Runtastic management has committed to exchanging our coffee capsules for an eco-friendly bean-to-cup machine fresh coffee beans, our daily fruits and vegetables are now delivered in wooden boxes rather than in plastic wrapping, and we now only buy goods for our breakfast that are not wrapped in plastic.

We keep moving forward – bit by bit.

At Runtastic, we are visionaries. We are going to make the world a better place (well actually, we are already). We are not going to stop adapting our – individual and company-wide – buying habits, but will continue to think of new ways to reduce our waste.  Runtastics have suggested holding a clothing swap to make use of our old clothes. We may even host an entire flea market within the company to show our employees the benefits of upcycling their goods instead of throwing them away. And we keep investing our energy into finding additional ways to live a more sustainable life.

How are you contributing to a better environment? And what ideas do you have that companies like Runtastic can implement? Leave us a comment below!

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