Today I met with Bruce and Damien from Ecovantage. They are environmental scientists and have launched Ecovantage with a vision of helping households, schools, businesses and organisations reduce their carbon emissions and save water.
After an initial meeting a few weeks ago, we asked Ecovantage to independently audit our business to calculate our carbon footprint. ( a carbon footprint is simply how much CO2 a companies' activities are generating)
Here's what they came up with;
electricity, cars, staff, travel, flights: 54.5 tonnes over the last 12 months
manufacturing and transporting products: 1083 tonnes over the last 12 months
It certainly seems like a big number for a relatively small company. It was interesting that the paper products that we sell, actually emit more CO2 in their manufacturing and transport than the plastic products. Be that as it may, the task at hand is to offset this CO2.
Bruce and Damien explained that there are a variety of methods to offset CO2 including;
1. Requesting renewable energy from your power company
Renewable energy is primarily generated from solar and wind sources. Hydro (ie, the snowy river scheme) is also a renewable source, however, to qualify for an offset, the hydro plant needs to have been built after the mid 1990's.
It also seems that green energy packages vary greatly in their environmental integrity.
On the face of it, the greenelectricitywatch site provides a brilliant comparison of green energy from a myriad of suppliers.
This site does not shrink away from calling out products making environmental claims which are having little or no positive impact on the environment. Electricity packages from different companies are graded on a 1 to 5 star rating system and are listed in order of merit.
The chart below is from the site on 3/4/2007
Ecovantage will be making contact with Origin Energy on our behalf. Origin Energy rated very highly in the rankings. It probably makes good business sense for them, it appears that in the past year, green energy has increased from 3 % to 12 % of total electricity supplied in Australia.
2. Purchasing RECs (renewable energy certificates)
Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), also known as Green tags, Renewable Energy Credits, or Tradable Renewable Certificates (TRCs), are the property rights to the environmental benefits from generating electricity from renewable energy sources. These certificates can be sold and traded and the owner of the REC can legally claim to have purchased renewable energy. While traditional carbon emissions trading programs promote low-carbon technologies by increasing the cost of emitting carbon, RECs incentivize carbon-neutral renewable energy by providing a subsidy to electricity generated from renewable sources.
In states which have a REC program, a green energy provider (such as a wind farm) is credited with one REC for every 1,000 kWh of electricity it produces (for reference, an average residential customer consumes about 300 kWh in a month). A certifying agency gives each REC a unique identification number to make sure it doesn't get double-counted. The green energy is then fed into the electrical grid (by mandate), and the accompanying REC can then be sold on the open market.)
3. Buying carbon offset credits from a company that supplies products that displace reliance on electricity
Products such as energy efficient light globes and water saving showerheads reduce electricity consumption and thus reduce the generation of carbon dioxide.
Easy being green are a company that distribute these items.
Since 2004, their products distributed by them have had the following impact;
* Reduced 620,000 tonnes of CO2 pollution per year, the equivalent to taking 150,000 cars off the road.
* Saved 5.8 gigalitres of water – the equivalent to 2500 Olympic sized swimming pools.
* Saved households $32.3 million off their energy bills.
That in my mind is a great effort. Easy being green, like the energy companies, are businesses rather than non profit organisations. The beauty of easy being greens' business model is that they give away energy saving packs (including the globes and showerheads) free of charge.
4. Planting trees
My lovely girlfriend and I travelled to the WOMAD World Music festival in Adelaide a few weeks ago and visited displays run by trees for life and ACBI.
below: the Womad festival
These two companies plant trees on land that they legally protect via covenant for 70 to 100 years.
The criteria for selecting native trees and grasses to plant on a site, are that the species were previously growing in the area. Many of these sites are regarded as being "stressed" by either wind or water erosion and or salinity. Planting trees is seen to benefit these issues in addition to the trees' role in storing carbon dioxide.
It struck me as an important piece in the climate change jig saw that in South Australia's Murray Darling Basin alone, 15 billion trees have been cleared during the last 150 years. There is mounting evidence that forests of trees create their own weather.
As an indication that there is growing big business interest in offsetting carbon dioxide by planting trees, on the ACBI site there is discussion of Mitsubishi manufacturing a model of car for which the carbon generated by all inputs and processes is to be offset by planting trees.
And while British satellite operator BSkyB has become carbon neutral and there is now serious discussions underway to make Rupert Murdoch's entire News Corporation empire carbon neutral.
Source: The Financial Times
Rupert Murdoch, the 75-year-old chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, is planning to push all parts of his media empire to become environmentally friendly, using the strategies put in place by his son and heir James. Mr Murdoch said at a conference organised by Bill Clinton, former US president, that climate change was important and he was planning to put in place strategies across his News Corp media business to tackle it. News Corp owns newspapers in the UK, Australia and the US, the Fox News Channel , 20th Century Fox studios and numerous television stations in the US, operations in India and China and also internet assets, such as popular social networking site MySpace . "We're going to be absolutely carbon neutral" across News Corp's businesses, Mr Murdoch said, adding he was "examining" how to eliminate emissions "in every country where we are".
Becoming carbon neutral involves reducing greenhouse gas emissions and "offsetting" the rest by investing in projects such as windfarms or forests that reduce carbon dioxide emissions. James, widely regarded as the likely heir to Mr Murdoch, has taken on climate change as a key issue. Mr Murdoch's adoption of his son's strategy is seen as a further sign that James is starting to influence his father.
Thats very interesting, as a country which is becoming an elephant in the clmate change room, I also wonder what China's view on offseting CO2 is.
Conclusion
When we reviewed the options for offsetting carbon with ecovantage, we decided to break our offsets into two parts;
for electricity, cars, staff, travel and flights amounting to 54.5 tonnes of CO2 ; we will most likely sign up for a combination of green energy and trees
for manufacturing and transporting products amounting to 1083 tonnes of CO2; we will sign up for trees and also offset via energy efficient product programs
We plan to finalise our first month's carbon offsets this week.
Greg
