How we achieved our First Carbon Neutral Conference
We recently challenged ourselves for our annual Business Conference to do things differently and it is because of this that we became the first in the Travis Perkins Plc Group to host a conference with a Carbon Neutral Venue and Travel!
To achieve this, we started by choosing a venue that had carbon high on their agenda, who worked hard on energy, water and waste efficiency and which calculates operational carbon so that we have the chance to offset it. From there, we picked a central point in the UK to hold the conference to try and limit travel distances, whilst encouraging the delegates that attended to travel by public transport where possible.
Attempts to reduce carbon certainly mitigated the environmental impact the Conference had, but some carbon had to be emitted to host it. Thus, the next thing we had to do was calculate it. The Hilton Hotel that attendees stayed at calculated the operational emissions to be 40 tonnes, due to energy, water and waste from our stay. We also calculated the travel for all delegates in attendance to and from the Conference would come in at over 12 tonnes.
Combined together, we recognised that 52 tonnes would represent the main emissions, but this figure would ignore the additional indirect emissions from sourcing the food and other consumables used at the Conference. This unknown extra footprint cannot be accurately calculated - hence the claim that the venue and travel for the conference was carbon neutral as opposed to the whole conference - but because we take the impacts seriously, we ensured that any printed items at the Conference were made with sustainable materials, from carbon neutral printing companies. This meant that all items were either made from recycled materials, have been recycled since the event or were made from biodegradable pulp. We also used a number of trees across the venue which are being re-planted across our Birmingham branches.
The final step is to offset the carbon emissions. We will do this by donating to the Pacajai REDD+ Project in Brazil, which is working to prevent unplanned deforestation in native Amazonian forests. This amazing work will prevent the emission of an equivalent 22 million tonnes of carbon that would otherwise come from logging. The great news is that the offset company we’ve chosen will also plant 52 trees in the UK for us - one for every certified offset we’ve purchased for the projects abroad.
All of this has culminated into a first for our business, and a sustainable direction for us to continue to work towards.