Carbon Neutral Status

We’re passionate about being the greenest Internet Service Provider in the UK. As everyone is adopting greener lifestyles at home by recycling more, using energy efficient appliances and choosing more efficient cars, we have taken a positive step to adopting these ideas in the workplace.

We all have the chance to make changes to contribute to the wellbeing of our environment and as a business we’re committed to reducing our impact on the environment.

Our Going Green programme has three simple elements:

• the first steps were to understand our current carbon emissions and offset these by investing in projects to combat climate change
• the actions we’re taking to reduce our emissions and our environmental impact
• by telling you about our environmental projects and sharing our experience we hope to encourage other businesses, however large or small, to take similar actions. So what can you do?

First Steps

We worked with the Carbon Neutral Company, a leading climate change organisation, to understand our ‘carbon footprint’ – the CO₂ emissions we produce as a by-product of developing and delivering products and services to our customers.

What did we do?

• The Carbon Neutral Company used our gas and electricity bills to calculate our annual energy consumption
• They used details of our expenditure on hotels, flights, public transport, taxis and private vehicles to calculate our CO₂ emissions resulting from business travel
• They analysed the fuel used by our network engineers and the CO2 emissions produced by the volume of modems and routers sent to our customers
• Finally, we surveyed our employees to find out how far and how often they travelled to and from work, as well as the mode of transport they used. The resulting emissions were included when the Carbon Neutral Company calculated our total carbon footprint. This gave us as full a picture as possible of our carbon footprint to understand what was required for us to Become Carbon Neutral.

Becoming Neutral

The chart below shows the top-level breakdown of our CO₂ outputs.

Our annual CO₂ emissions for the initial year we could measure (2005 - 2006) were calculated as 733 cubic tonnes. To become carbon neutral, and to maintain our carbon neutral status going forward, we invested in environmental projects that will offset (or neutralise) 733 cubic tonnes of CO₂ emissions per year until 2010.

Because our annual carbon footprint is based on our emissions for the previous year, we address any deficit in our emissions 'balance sheet' at the end of each financial year.

Reducing Emissions

While investing in carbon offsetting projects helps to counteract the impact we have on the environment, we recognise that it’s not enough. Along with every business and individual in the UK and the world, we need to dramatically reduce our carbon emissions and we've already taken some steps within our workplace to achieve this.

We have:

• Installed video conferencing facilities and encourage the use of these as well as audio conference calling to reduce business travel
• Installed low energy lighting in our offices
• Reduced our energy consumption by creating a thin client call centre, which uses terminal services and TFT screens rather than desktop PCs
• Introduced a program for all PC monitors to enter sleep mode after a period of inactivity
• Provided our Teleworker Broadband service to our remote / home workers
• Spread the word that everyone has a part to play in reducing our carbon emissions by promoting environmental awareness in our communications to employees. Our staff now only print double-sided documents when necessary and switch off lights and electrical and computing equipment when not in use.

We now all recognise as a company that climate change is a problem we all need to take responsibility for.

Other activities

As well as setting a target to reduce the carbon emissions that we measure each year, we’ve also introduced other activities and plan to introduce more. They won’t have an impact on our official carbon footprint but they still help us to be a more environmentally-friendly organisation.

By recycling a larger volume and a wider range of materials, introducing paperless communications and billing to our customers and using recycled stationery, we are helping to make our world a little greener.

Carbon Projects

How does carbon offsetting work?

For every tonne of CO₂ we produce, we have bought a 'carbon credit' from a project somewhere else in the world which has saved one tonne of CO₂. These projects include forestry initiatives as well as climate friendly technology where, for example, kerosene heaters are replaced with 'clean' solar panels for heat and cooking. The new technology saves CO₂ from being released into the atmosphere.

Eclipse's investment in carbon offsetting projects has been allocated as follows:

• 60% towards a wind farm project in India
• 20% towards a methane capture project in the US
• 20% towards a forestry project in Uganda