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I’m sad to say we didn’t manage to meet our pledge to go carbon neutral in 2019. Life was too busy and other personal and professional commitments had to come first at that time. I fell far behind with even blogging about it.

But we’re not giving up! We did put in place quite a few measures, and I have now offset the emissions that were left after our efforts. I think that means we’re carbon neutral, but as I said at the beginning of the process it’s nothing like cost-effective for us to get certified.

I chose to offset via a scheme that is installing biogas in homes in Kenya1. Morwenna and I spent some time there back in 2008 and we saw that many houses do still cook on wood fires, so enabling some homes to have a source of heat that emits less CO2 and saves people from inhaling wood smoke seemed like a good use of our funds.

It’s really not that expensive to offset carbon emissions, and of course it’s not as good as reducing them in the first place, but I’m sure it’s better than not offsetting them.

We’ll carry on doing things to reduce our emissions. Long term I’d like to get solar panels on our workshop-it especially makes sense as we’d be mostly using the power during the day when it’s being generated. And we should probably find a way to insulate the workshop better to use less bottled gas for heating. But of course, these things need to happen alongside running a viable business, and there are only so many hours in a day!

I’ll write about our progress as it happens, so watch this space. In case you missed our progress so far, you can read about it here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

 

Calculations

These calculations are for the business since we moved into our new premises in July 2018, a period of 18 months:

Elec use 7146 units = 4764 per year = 1472 kg CO2e2 per year

LPG use 288 litres = 192 litres per year = 310 kg CO2eper year

1782 kg of CO per year, or a total of 2673 kg over the past 18 months

Double it assuming there are things I’ve missed, rounding up gives 6 tons of CO2 to offset.

1https://www.goldstandard.org/projects/kenya-biogas-programme

2This uses a CO2 emission factor of 0.309 kge/kWh. This is the average for the UK. Ours is almost certainly lower than this as we get our electricity from Ecotricity, but there’s no harm in using pessimistic figures.

3CO2 emission factor of 3.01 kge/kg, where 1 litre = 0.537 kg

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