Everyone’s lifestyle affects our environment. The way you go about your day affects CO2 levels in our atmosphere which contributes to climate change. After calculating our carbon footprint, we decided to set a goal to become carbon neutral.
But what does it mean to be carbon neutral? Allow me to explain carbon neutrality, what we did to achieve it and how you can be carbon neutral too.
What is Carbon Neutrality?
So, the term carbon neutral describes when an organization, businesse or individual decides to take action and offset their carbon footprint. To be specific, their goal is to remove as many carbon emissions from the atmosphere as they put in to it.
Off-setting carbon emissions can include buying offsets or investing in projects that help restore the environment. For example, supporting reforestation efforts or using clean energy.
Your carbon footprint is the amount of greenhouse gases—including carbon dioxide and other gases—that you produce during your life. The average American produces about 19.78 metric tonnes (21.8 tons) of CO2 emissions each year. To put that into perspective, that’s about 864 bags of trash or 6.9 tons of landfilled waste.
Overall, TONS of carbon emissions are added into the atmosphere from people every single day. So off-setting emissions and taking steps to reducing your impact is important for our environment!
How did we become Carbon Neutral?
Before we can offset our carbon emissions, we have to know how much carbon we produce (our carbon footprint). We started measuring part of our carbon output 2 years ago via cooperative coffees and takingroot.org. Since we are a company that is an importer, roaster, wholesaler, and retailer there are a lot of emissions to account for!
So, we used a calculator that allowed us to measure our CO2 created from employee travel, coffee imports, retail exports, and energy use. We even measured impact of incoming local deliveries. These include newspapers, bakery items, and other products. We wanted to make sure we took as much as we could into account.
Ultimately, we wanted to make sure where we invested in a carbon offset project where we could see our impact. There are many different carbon offset projects on the internet you find. Here at Amavida we wanted to make sure that we can trust our offsets were going to projects that impacted coffee producers. So we partnered with Taking Root to invest in projects that go directly toward improving the lives of coffee growing communities.
