Carbon Footprint – Our Quest to Carbon Neutrality

There now seems an irresistible weight of evidence that Global warming, exacerbated by man’s pollution, is a reality. 

Whilst actions to reduce and control the rate of warming and its implications are most likely to be effective when taken Globally, the actions of millions of individuals and companies will also have an effect. 

We believe that doing nothing because our emissions are tiny compared with the US, China and India is a lazy option. Every small action we and millions like us, take, will have a large cumulative effect and so, if its possible to take them we should do so. 

When we first started talking and looking at this, the first response of most of us was, “we’ll invest in planting trees or in alternative energy”. As we looked deeper, however, we found that whilst tree planting ‘felt greener’ it would in fact take many years to have an effect, if only because the trees need time to grow! Finally we came to the conclusion that the most effective & responsible thing we could do was to help reduce our own carbon emissions wherever possible. We also take the view that the whole point of civilisation is to improve our lives, so a breast-beating return to the stone-age wasn’t a viable solution either. We therefore feel we need to do sensible things to manage emissions without dramatically detracting from our quality of life. 

The first thing we have set about doing is examining our business, how we create a carbon footprint, and what we might do to reduce that. This is an ongoing process. 

We have created our ‘Environmental task force’ with members of all parts of the company to examine all aspects of our Environmental impact. 

It is early days for us, there are lots of things still do and we can’t do everything at once, but we do feel we have made a start & our actions are beginning to have an effect. 

How we’re reducing carbon emissons

In areas where it is not practical to reduce our carbon emissions further we have committed to offset them with our longer term goal to become a Carbon Neutral Company. 

This occurs in 2 main areas: 

Firstly; we establish our carbon emissions from energy usage in all our operations such as heating our office, delivering goods and servicing our customers machines, then we offset this. 

Secondly; and perhaps more important to our customers, we decided to offset the carbon emissions associated with the electricity usage of every one of our machines with customers … for life! 

We have thousands of machines providing customers with refreshing chilled and hot water. It is important and healthy that they should have these, but each one uses a small amount of energy. We can calculate the energy our watercoolers and water heaters use per annum and again offset it. As long as you have one of our machines you can be rest assured the carbon emissions from the energy usage is being offset. 

How do we carbon offset? And what good does it do? 

The Kyoto Protocol has been signed by over 160 nations. In very simple terms, it enabled the creation of emission permits to be issued to a large range of polluting companies and energy suppliers. 

So polluters have carbon permits, if they use less than they are allowed, they will have some spare which they can then sell. If they use too many, then they must buy more from someone who hasn’t used theirs, or be fined. The result is that there is now a Carbon Market where permits can be bought and sold. 

Kyoto however, created only a limited number of permits and over time the number available will be progressively reduced. In other words, as time goes on, the number of credits available to pollute goes down, meaning that companies are forced to take actions to reduce their emissions or risk having to buy more expensive credits or be fined. 

Cooler Sense has joined with Pure the Clean Planet Trust to purchase carbon permits on the market and then to ‘retire’ them. This means that we help accelerate the reduction in the permits available thus helping force polluters to reduce their emissions even faster. 

About Pure the Clean Planet Trust: 

Pure is a registered charity (1112249) dedicated to reducing the carbon footprint of businesses & communities. PURE is committed to the highest quality of offsetting & carbon policy standards and satisfies rigourous requirements of the Independent Quality Assurance Scheme. It is apolitical, inclusive, independent and transparent. PURE supports  renewable & energy efficiency projects that are registered and verified by the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism & or Gold Standard. The credits purchased by PURE to support these projects are cancelled within a year of purchase to put them beyond use & to ensure thet are not double counted. 

Want to know more? 

Want to Carbon offset your own organisation? 

Then click on the link to www.puretrust.org.uk 

You will also find useful and interesting information on:

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_protocol
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming