MS Carbon Footprint Part 1
Where are we at?
Well I have to admit that after the initial push to get the website done, everything appears to have gone wonkey. A large part of this delay is from ongoing priorities, and the remainder is from new projects. ‘Carbon Neutral MS’ has been put on the back burner—not because it isn’t essential, but because on the whole MS doesn’t create much wastage. We are far too lean a company to make lots of obvious ‘trimming’. We don’t have lot of computers on all the time pulling unnecessarily from the national grid, we don’t do excess travel, we don’t print crazy amounts of paper, and everything we do source in, which has a low carbon option, we jump at.
There are clearly things we can do, but I’m a little concerned that too many adjustments whilst we’re already lean, are only going to materialise as being inconvenient to our existing methods of operating. Not good.
Travel is an obvious one to look at. Flying from Bristol to Cardiff is excessive and wasteful but flying from Bristol to Glasgow isn’t, if you look at the amount of time it takes to go by train.
When this excess ‘footprint’ is unavoidable, what do we do about it? How is it recorded?
We can log the wastage, and offset it. This has been the stalling point so far—finding a decent, reliable, ‘officially recognised’ system of measuring logging and offsetting our energy usage effectively.
Luckily those good people at Howies have also considered this, and pointed us in the right direction of some things to investigate: carbontrust.co.uk, carbon-calculator & they specifically choose to work with the Clean Carbon Working Group. Has anyone worked with these?
The immediate goal is to log our electrical usage as we know that’s a biggie. Technically there’s only 2 full time people in MS right now, but there’s a growing number of freelancers we utilise. Is it ethically within our place to advise / insist on the travel and energy usage of freelancers? I don’t feel it is. We can ask, we can plead, and we can slowly phase out people that ‘burn energy’, but we have no control over it.
The other thing considered is the carbon footprint the clients we work with. We want to communicate our stance on doing the small bit we can, giving them all the knowledge we’ve gathered and steering them in the best places to track, calculate and offset their excess.
Where possible we’d love them to be considerate to the environment, but again, is it our place to enforce our beliefs onto them? No. We can inform and give options to make it as easy and aware of our ethics, but at the end of the day its all in their hands, and we’re not going to punish anyone for the way they conduct their business.
An alternative plan is doing something else with the money that would be going to re-pot new tree’s—perhaps, donating chunks of MS earnings to decent causes and local green schemes? This feels good to me, and the way MS likes to operate but I don’t know enough about this to make a quick decision. Has anyone else out there have any experience of this?
Lets also get our green message online, making sure everyone that visits is aware of our concerns and efforts to change—its an easy thing to get going, why isn’t everyone doing this?
So this is where we’re at, and this is what we’re thinking. Hopefully this post will generate thoughts in the way you work, and if so let us know in the comments.
We will keep you posted on our decisions, hurdles and progress.
April 2nd, 2009
You could use Dopplr to log all your trips which has a carbon calculator. They do a nice end of year report. Mine is here.