Going Carbon Neutral

The Bamboo Fabric Store recently went neutral – carbon neutral.
In this article Tristan Claridge explores the pros and cons of carbon offsets.

Climate change is a hot topic and many businesses have realised that the government is asleep on the issue and that it’s up to us to do something about it ourselves. A common response is to make your activities carbon neutral. This involves offsetting carbon emissions with activities that remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Most of our activities result in the release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. When we use energy (especially from non-renewable sources), when we use products made and transported with energy, when we transport ourselves or our products by car or truck, all these activities result in emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

It is possible however to remove carbon from the atmosphere, thereby offsetting your emissions.

The most common method of offsetting carbon emissions is by tree planting. Over the lifespan of a tree carbon is absorbed and locked up in the wood, leaves and roots of the tree thereby removing it from the atmosphere.

This is temporary however as the carbon can be re-released back into the atmosphere from fire or from the death and decomposition of the tree. A tree will absorb about a fifth of a tonne of carbon, but this takes about 30 years, while the carbon from your emissions are in the atmosphere warming the planet today.

There are several carbon offset calculators that can give you an estimate of how many trees need to be planted to offset your emissions. This is pretty straightforward for an individual, but for a business there are many more complex issues to deal with.

For a start, you need to decide whether you are making your business carbon neutral, or your products.

If it is just your business, then you can set about considering all of your activities: electricity, transport, materials, etc.

If you want to make your products carbon neutral then you need to work both backwards and forwards through the product lifecycle and estimate emissions from each step from cradle to grave.

Having recently gone through the process of trying to estimate all possible emissions Bamboo Fabric Store decided to not make the products carbon neutral, but to make the business carbon neutral instead. I will discuss the problems we found in more detail.

Bamboo is very effective at absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and converting it into plant material. If this organic matter is then made into fabric then this carbon is removed from the cycle for a fairly long period of time. Eventually the end products made from bamboo fabric will wear out and be discarded with the carbon returning to the atmosphere.

We found though that the carbon locked up in the fabric was small compared to the amount of carbon that was emitted by the processing, manufacturing and shipping of the product. Obvious steps that could reduce this emission include using green energy in the processing and manufacturing and reducing the shipping distance by sourcing suppliers closer to the point of sale.

To offset this, and the emissions relating to the activities of the Bamboo Fabric Store, we calculated that the costs of tree planting would actually be fairly minimal. This would seem unlikely, as surely climate change is not that easy to solve.

Well, you’re right. This would almost certainly not solve climate change as it does very little to reduce the carbon being added to the atmosphere in the short term. Even more significant is the fact that in most cases the carbon being captured is not being removed from the atmospheric carbon cycle long term.

The atmospheric carbon cycle is essential for most life on earth. It cycles through living things including animals and plants and there is a considerable stock of carbon in the atmosphere. Human activities have greatly reduced the global forest cover. This plant material absorbs carbon from the atmosphere. Land clearing has released most of the carbon in this lost plant material back to the atmosphere also. This is one way in which we are affecting the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

More significantly, we are currently adding huge amounts of carbon from stocks of carbon outside of the normal cycle – we are burning coal, oil and natural gas that has been locked away from the atmospheric cycle for millions of years.

To effectively offset these emissions, we would need to return carbon to long term stocks as fast as we are burning it. This is the limitation of tree planting for offsetting carbon emissions.

Until there is a better option, tree planting is a viable option, particularly when it is done in a way that enhances biodiversity, reduces soil erosion and supports local communities. Even more important is improving efficiency to reduce the amount of emissions.

The Bamboo Fabric Store has come to the conclusion that the best we will do the following:

• Use only ‘green’ energy from a local provider
• Actively improve energy efficiency, including turning off unused lights and equipment
• Using low energy and reusable packaging and continuing to research further improvements
• Buying tree planting from a reputable not-for-profit organization that undertakes plantings as described above

We will continue to search for more and better ways to mitigate against climate change. If you have any ideas, please contact us.