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Posts Tagged ‘carbon offsets’

Offset 350 Lbs. of Carbon with Your Blog Through Brighter Planet’s Brilliant Green Promotion

The more research I do online about green advertising, sustainable marketing, eco-friendly promotions. etc., the more really cool sites I find that help us all have a hand in greening our plant with a simple click of our collective mice.

350-brighter-planet350.brighterplanet.com is one more gem discovered.

You’ll notice to the right of this post (ok, you might have to scroll down a bit) my new badge for participating in Brighter Planet’s mission to offset carbon. And you can too.

Just place the badge on your blog, let Brighter Planet know, and they’ll offset 350 pounds of carbon in your name.  Why 350 pounds? According to the website, 350 is the parts per million of Co2 in the atmosphere that we must aim for if we want to keep the planet relatively safe. Brighter Planet’s 350 Challenge: Get 350 bloggers to post the badge, and each receives a 350 carbon offset in their name. It’s been hugely successful with more than 1,600 badging-up.

The program was inspired by Bill McKibben’s awareness campaign that you can learn about at 350.org. You can also hear his podcast on Brighter Planet’s blog.

Where does Brighter Planet’s money go on your behalf?

They invest in a variety of renewable energy projects that might otherwise go unfunded and/or unnoticed. You can learn about their carbon offset policy and meet the people on their project selection committee.

So what do you say? Slap the badge on your blog. Let the Brighter Planet people know.  And you’ll offset 350 pounds of gunk in the air. It’s just another small and easy thing we can all do to help brighten the planet and curb global warming. Pretty cool, eh?

Carbon Neutral TV Spots. Are They For Real?

Now you can offset the carbon created by your creative.

New York Ad Agency Brooklyn Brothers claims to have just produced the first carbon neutral TV commercials.  But do they add up?

According to agency co-founder, Guy Barnett, the agency worked with UK resource management company ERM to calculate and offset the carbon produced for a TV campaign created for Versus TV Channel.

Here’s the math:

  1. 15 TV commercials
  2. Shot on location in Texas
  3. 80 crew members
  4. 40 vehicles
  5. 10 flights
  6. Extensive shoot production facilities
  7. Hundreds of hours in post production editing

= 8.9 tons of carbon produced

Cost to offset? Just $20 per ton = $180

This sounds all very impressive until you get to the $180 part.  Can anyone tell me how the $180 offsets nearly 9 tons of carbon?  This seems like such a minimal cost for so much pollution. So I dug deeper.  ClimateCare.org is the organization that helped Brooklyn Brothers make their spots carbon neutral. Here’s a quick explanation of how it works.

So now all of us in the green advertising business need to consider how we can easily offset our creative carbon footprint. We probably don’t even have to do the calculation. Just budget an extra $200 into every production budget and get with organizations like ClimateCare.org to help us clean up our mess.

Have you ever consider the carbon footprint of your TV or photo shoot? If so, how’d you go about offsetting it?