I might be buying a home soon, and I’ve been really concerned having one that’s energy-efficient and sustainable. The place that we might make an offer on is way cool, but it’s got some issues such as a lot of enormous single-pane windows. Ideally we’d like to invest in the home to make it more efficient, but we may not be able to afford to do that. So after a little digging, I found out that it might be better for us to buy carbon offsets. We’d essentially donate X amount of money to a nonprofit, and the agency would use that money on projects that reduce the amount of CO2 emissions elsewhere. And the amount we’d pay would offset the amount of carbon emissions we let loose. One project I read about involved hooking long-haul diesel trucks to the electrical grid at truck stops, so they can power their electronic systems each night without having to keep their engines idling. That cuts down on greenhouse gas emissions.
I think it’s a pretty cool notion.
Anyway, I poked around a number of carbon offset agency web sites until I came upon TerraPass, which has an entire section dedicated to having a carbon-neutral wedding. The idea here is that for any given wedding, guests will be driving or flying all over the country, renting cars to drive from the airport to the wedding venue, renting hotel rooms, etc. I used TerraPass’ carbon footprint calculator for weddings and came up with an estimate that a mountain wedding in Vail with 120 guests — which is a pretty normal affair — would let loose 120,000 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere. That’s equivalent to having 6 households running full-bore for a year, or having 30 cars driving around for a year. Wow! So basically TerraPass lets you calculate what your wedding’s carbon footprint is, and then lets you purchase an offset.
I thought this was a pretty cool idea too, so I started thinking about the travel that I’ve done and will do this year in the name of photography. A trip to New Zealand, at least two weddings in the Caribbean, half a dozen weddings in California — needless to say, I’ll be flying around a lot too! So I am going to research running Dreamtime Images Wedding Photography as a carbon neutral company, and I hope to soon be offsetting all the carbon emissions from destination and local weddings that I photograph.
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