There now seems an irresistible weight of evidence that Global warming, exacerbated by man’s pollution, is a reality.

Whilst actions to reduce and control the rate of warming and its implications are most likely to be effective when taken Globally, the actions of millions of individuals and companies will also have an effect.

We believe that doing nothing because our emissions are tiny compared with the US, China and India is a lazy option. Every action we and millions like us, take, will have a small effect and so, if its possible to take them we should do so.

When we first started talking and looking at this, the first response of most of us was, "we’ll invest in planting trees or in alternative energy". As we looked deeper, however, we found that whilst tree planting ‘felt greener’ it would in fact take many years to have an effect, if only because the trees need time to grow! Finally we came to the conclusion that the most effective thing we could do was to do things to help reduce carbon emissions. We also take the view that the whole point of civilisation is to improve our lives, so a breast-beating return to the stone-age wasn’t a viable solution either. We therefore feel we need to do sensible things to manage emissions without dramatically detracting from our quality of life.

So the first thing we have set about doing is examining our business, how we create a carbon footprint, and what things we might do to reduce that. This is an ongoing process.

We have created our ‘Environmental task force’ with members of all parts of the company to examine all aspects of our Environmental impact.

It is early days for us, there are lots of things still do and we can’t do everything at once, but we do feel we’re beginning to have an effect.

The second thing we are doing is that in areas where it is not practical to reduce our carbon emissions further we are now offsetting them to become a CARBON OFFSET COMPANY.

This occurs in 2 main areas. Firstly we establish our carbon usage in all our operations such as heating our office, delivering goods and servicing machines with customers, then we offset this.

Secondly, and perhaps more important to our customers, we decided to offset the carbon footprint of every one of our machines with customers ... for life!

We have thousands of machines providing customers with refreshing chilled and hot water. It is important and healthy that they should have these, but each one uses a small amount of energy. We can calculate the energy our watercoolers and water boilers use per annum and again offset it. As long as you have one of our machines you can rest assured its carbon footprint is being offset. Soon, if you already have one of our machines you will be seeing the logo shown here appearing on it.

So how do we offset and what Good does it do?

The Kyoto protocol has been signed by over 160 nations. In very simple terms, it enabled the creation of emission permits to be issued to a large range of polluting companies and energy suppliers.

So polluters have carbon permits, if they use less than they are allowed, they will have some spare which they can then sell. If they use too many, then they must buy more from someone who hasn’t used theirs, or be fined. The result is that there is now a Carbon Market where permits can be bought and sold.

Kyoto however, created only a limited number of permits and over time the number available will be progressively reduced. In other words, as time goes on, the number of credits available to pollute goes down, meaning that companies are forced to take actions to reduce their emissions or risk having to buy more expensive credits or be fined.

Filterpure Ltd has joined with Pure to purchase carbon permits on the market and then to ‘retire’ them. This means that we help accelerate the reduction in the permits available thus helping force polluters to reduce their emissions even faster.

About Pure

Pure is one of only four UK Government approved, for the proposed ‘Gold Standard’, carbon offsetting organisations. It is apolitical, inclusive, independent and transparent. It only uses permits regulated by the EU, United Nations or NASD. Finally it has a fast effect - it reduces emissions within their year of permit issue.

Want to know more?

Want to Carbon offset your own organisation?

Then click on the link to www.puretrust.org.uk

You will also find useful and interesting information on
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_protocol
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming