Alan Ng, November 24, 2010
Things are really getting busy here behind the scenes at Wheel2Wheel!
If you’ve seen our homepage recently you’ll have noticed the big countdown timer at the bottom of the welcome screen. The countdown to our D-Day (1 March 2011, in this instance, not to be confused with 6 June 1944).
And you may have noticed that we passed a big milestone this weekend. We are now less than 100 days until the big day: no more preliminaries, Morgan and Simon will kickstart the BMWs, and commence the W2W adventure in earnest.
So the pressure is on…
Stay tuned to W2W via your favourite social media channel, as we begin to turn up the volume. Look out for features on our final preparations, our selected charities and our fundraising activities.
Now, we are also delighted to announce that we recently completed one of our most important pre-departure checks: offsetting our carbon dioxide emissions for the 20,000km journey that lies ahead. Given our desire to raise awareness and support for social and environmental issues throughout Asia and Australia, it is important to all of us in the team that in doing so we leave a positive impact.
Carbon Neutral, an Australian not-for-profit organisation, understood our needs and provided our carbon offset services in a prompt, efficient and friendly manner.
Carbon Neutral works with hundreds of organisations to measure, reduce and offset greenhouse gas emissions and support revegetation projects. To date Carbon Neutral has planted over 2 million trees in Australia.
Tree-planting alone, while excellent for the natural environment in so many ways, can take between 70~100 years to fully sequester the CO2 emissions that we intend to offset. I am informed that the majority of that amount is absorbed in the first 30~40 years, but that was still too slow for us! Carbon Neutral provided us a solution that allowed us to purchase offset credits – called Verified Emissions Reductions, regulated by the Australian Government – which are credits earned by officially approved projects that have already cut their carbon emissions.
In other words, the carbon dioxide that will be generated by the W2W bikes, vehicles and energy consumption is being immediately offset by projects that have achieved significant emissions reductions as of today, in addition to Carbon Neutral planting trees on our behalf for the long term good of the planet.
We’re proud to be associated with the work of Carbon Neutral. In combination with our efforts to inspire community-minded actions among our supporters, to raise awareness of brilliant charitable organisations, and to directly support the protection of our environment by raising money to protect Indonesian rainforests, we feel confident that W2W is on track achieve our net positive impact.
Which is a good thing considering we’ve got less than 100 days to go …!
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