LiveNeutral

Organic has embarked on a journey to improve our environmental impact.  In June, we began by measuring our carbon footprint from utility use, business flights, and employee commutes for all of our offices around our network.  At the same time, we investigated the market for carbon credits.

We identified three main sources of carbon credits:  renewable energy, forestry, and energy efficiency.  We decided to go with the energy efficiency type of credits, because these are produced by actual reductions in carbon emissions by big business; as a result, the credits are more quantifiable and verifiable than the other kinds of credit as they incentivize industry to reduce their carbon footprint.

There are an ever-increasing number of players in the carbon credit market, and it was critical to us to choose a vendor whose practices we could be assured were optimally responsible.   After much consideration and much appreciated input from experts in the field, we selected LiveNeutral (formerly DriveNeutral) as our carbon credit vendor.

LiveNeutral is a San Francisco-based non-profit organization sponsored by the Presidio School of Management, which is an MBA program focused on raising the bar for green business practices, and whose involvement lends additional stature and quality control to LiveNeutral’s program.  Through LiveNeutral, we are purchasing Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) carbon credits to offset 100% of our carbon dioxide emissions. These credits represent real and permanent emissions reductions that were achieved by CCX members who adopted efficient and/or sustainable energy practices. In effect, Organic is now a carbon neutral workplace; as a point of reference, Organic has offset an amount of emissions equivalent to taking 750 cars off the road for a year. 

We have also begun taking efforts to significantly reduce our emissions such as by switching to recyclables and being more efficient with our energy usage, so that next year we will have a cleaner footprint and will need to offset fewer emissions.  Interested in finding out your own carbon footprint from driving or flying? Calculate it and take action at www.LiveNeutral.org <http://www.liveneutral.org/> . This is just one more way that Organic has acted creatively, cooperatively, and with integrity to solve a complex problem.   

I personally want to thank Jocelyn for reviewing and performing a thorough due diligence process on the companies in this space. 

More updates will be coming along as we make changes!

Marita