Cogo: The free-to-use app tracking your carbon footprint

Heather Martin speaks to Emma Kisby, the CEO of a ‘tech for good’ company and crusader against unconscious consumption

Children on a climate march in Kingston, southwest London (Cogo)

No one can be zero carbon,” says Emma Kisby, UK CEO of Cogo, the “tech for good” company that has devised a free-to-use carbon-tracking app enabling consumers to instantly see the carbon footprint of their spending. “Not unless they go off to a cave and live in the dark and eat berries. Which sounds rather appealing, after two years of homeschooling. But we can all be net zero.”

That is Kisby in a nutshell: self-deprecating and funny, mission-driven but pragmatic, an idealist, but also a realist. Her English father taught history and her Norwegian mother maths, so it was a natural step for Emma to find herself working as a teaching assistant straight out of school, albeit in some remote spot in the Dandenong Ranges, not far from Puffing Billy in the Australian state of Victoria, surrounded by lyre birds. A year was enough though, before she moved back to the UK to study History and German at Bristol, with a spell in Hanover courtesy of the much-loved, much-missed, EU-led Erasmus programme.

With an extensive employment background in marketing – the Darcy Group, Nectar, Sainsbury’s, Virgin – Kisby is well versed in consumer analytics and commercial partnerships. But teaching is in her DNA. She’s patient in explanation, delights in rewarding small achievements, and above all believes the best of us: that we all want to do the right thing and just need a little help along the way.