Carbon Neutral Events

Lately there has been much talk of climate change, the environment, and the footprint made by our activities on the earth. The union that I work for has spent considerably time reflecting on its activities and planning ways to counter the enormous imprint that we have. The first strategy was put into action yesterday and today.

Three times a year we bring in representatives from all of our locals across the province to a meeting in Toronto. Many from the far reaches fly, others drive or take the train. We spent two days in a hotel discussing policy, issues, and advising the Executive as to possible direction.

We have partnered with Tree Canada to offset the carbon emissions created by this event. Tree Canada calculates the total emissions created by the event through travel, the food our delegates would eat, the hotel usage, paper, etc and calculates how many trees would need to be planted in order to counter the impact of the event. This short event was calculated to create more than 3 tonnes of carbon emissions! In order to counter this we need to plant 166 trees - it will take these trees (assuming a 70 % survival rate) 10 years to offset the carbon created by our meeting.

Here is information about Tree Canada:

The Foundation encourages the running of your conference, trade show or annual meeting as "carbon neutral". By this we mean that the amount of carbon generated (through travel, heating, lights etc.) be offset through the planting of trees. The Foundation can assist your group in the calculation of carbon expenditure as well as calculating the amount of trees required to offset this amount of carbon.The Tree Canada Foundation will:

• do the carbon calculation estimate
• provide an estimate of the number of trees to plant to absorb the carbon over 1, 10, 20 or 80 years
• arrange the site selection, landowner contact, seedling transportation, tree seedling purchase, site preparation, planting, maintenance and survival assessments
• guarantee survival to be 70% to Year 5 of the planting by refill planting if necessary
• issue your event our "carbon neutral event" logo until the event has taken place
• place your event on our main homepage until the event and on our carbon neutral events listing page of the website