Skip to main content

Carbon off-setting for flights and offices

I am embarrassed to say we took 2 round trip short haul flights in May alone. One to the Outer Hebrides for a Scottish isles wedding and one to Berlin to see the sights. We did try to take trains to both destinations but the costs and travel time were not possible.

That said, the flights were still quite costly (though 1/2 as much as trains) and as I say every time I'm stuck in an airport, flying always takes way longer than people perceive. By the time you get to the airport, go through security, wait for boarding, lay-overs, delays, wait for luggage at other end... The 630 miles door to door to the Hebrides was 9 hours from London via Glasgow and Berlin (about 650 miles) was 6 hours each way including delays. If we had used the trains and ferries we would have only traveled a few more hours each way.

To offset these travels, plus our household emissions, I did some carbon neutralization research and shopping today. Everyone talks about carbon offsetting but I don't know anyone who has actually done it who recommends any company in particular. So I did a Google search to get me on my way.

+ Carbonneutral.com - They do gifts and household offsetting packages. But when I tried to calculate my emissions and find appropriate offsetting projects, their website structure and design got in the way and I went in circles. Noble cause, bad website. If you're the perseverant type, give it a look.

Frustrated, I tried my search again and ended up at:



+ Climatecare.org - This website is easy to get around, has clear information on all projects, videos of projects in action and a long list of partners. The easy to use calculators help you figure out how much CO2 you've emitted with flights, household and driving and the cost to offset it through their various programs which include:
Bioenergy (turning crop waste into biomass briquettes)
Human energy (replacing diesel water pumps on farms with human powered treadle pumps,much like the play pumps)
Wind energy - building wind turbine infrastructures
Efficient lighting and cooking stoves
Rain forest restoration

Each flight we took in May was about .4 tons of CO2 for the both of us. And I rounded up for our household emissions (though the husband just reminded me we already subscribe to green energy sources for our electricity). All in the costs of offsetting for the year was about £35 ($65 dollars).

I also did a quick calculation for my company, where staff fly constantly to meetings with oversees customers and we have a huge, old office with air conditioning that's on even when the windows are open and the cost was in the range of £4,000 pounds to offset. Me and our office manager only just got paper recycling costs sorted (we now recycle all paper) - this will be my next mission.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why isn't all packaging recyclable?

It's been an interesting week trying to buy household products and food only made from recyclable packaging. A mixed bag. Literally. For example, I just made a rocket (arugula) salad with fresh mozzarella. The rocket I bought from Waitrose last week was in a recyclable bag made from recycled plastic. However, the rocket I bought from Sainbury's today was in a bag that did not have the recyclable sign, nor was it made from recycled plastic. The Sainsbury's mozzarella was equally guilty. However, Sainsbury's does use some bags that are recyclable, mainly for their organic products. Less confusing were the products in cardboards boxes/cartons and aluminum packaging. All clearly recyclable. And almost all of the plastic packaging we bought was recyclable apart from a few random items we bought at Marks and Spencers and the lunch spot Eat. Things like salad containers that looked like they were candidates for the recycling pile turned out not to have any recycling symbols...

Relieving your travel guilt with carbon neutralization packages

Brother Ren, who shall now be called Research Ren as he is better at it than I am, has sent in this guilt-alleviating website which allows anyone to purchase carbon neutrlaization packages. + Carbon Neutral Question you may have: What is a carbon neautralization package? Is it something that can only be purchased at Star Trek conventions? Answer: These packages plant trees to help absorb the nastiness left in the air from your flight to the Maldives. It will also calculate how much CO2 you emit on flights based on your destination as well as CO2 you emit with your car mileage. It's a smart site, easy to use and I feel more green-angelic just for looking at it. We're taking the Eurostar/TGV to a wedding in the south of France in 2 weeks rather than flying but we still have all of those air miles to make up for from our London-NY-San Fran-LA-London trip so looks like we'll be using this site's offerings to help to plant a small forest somewhere. (Though I do wonder how ...

TGV - how energy efficient is it really?

We took another holiday, using the TGV instead of flying as our mode of transport, in August, as our attempts to keep air miles down continues. But as we zoomed through the French countryside at 180 MPH, we wondered how efficient is the TGV, really? Or have we just bought into the hype that it is more efficient than flying? I've never seen any statistics other than soft evidence provided by The Guardian and various news sources. We've been told by journalists that train travel is significantly greener, but with the electricity required to hurl a TGV through the countryside, and electricity plants being a major contributor to green house gases, what was a real, non-hype comparison? Or was my sudden skepticism just an excuse to trade the 5 1/2 hours on the stuffy train in for 1 hour on a plane? (Always fun going down and an absolute pain coming back.) With a little investigating, I found some statistical information comparing the efficiency of various modes of transport, based...