An avid traveler often faces some tough choices concerning the environment. While it’s true that traveling helps breaks down cultural barriers and opens a window of education and enlightenment, it often does so at a detriment to the environment. Just a simple round-trip flight to Europe for example, burns fossil fuels and dumps enormous amounts of pollutants and climate-changing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; and that’s just the start. A conscious traveler would look beyond the jet fuel and the CO2 and consider all of the resources that go into sustaining each person when they travel, but things can get really depressing really fast. What do we do? That’s been the big question at Ryder-Walker.
For 2008, Ryder-Walker Alpine Adventures hopes to make every round-trip flight from the U.S. to Europe as Carbon Neutral as possible. We’ve already purchased 300 Green Tags, (approximately 420,000 lbs worth of offset greenhouse gas emissions), from the Bonneville Environmental Institute. Please visit: www.b-e-f.org and www.greentags.org for more detailed information.
The Bonneville Environmental Foundation, a non-profit organization, sells carbon offsets as renewable energy certificates, which it calls Green Tags, to replace traditional polluting sources of electricity with clean, secure, and sustainable renewable sources of energy that come from solar and wind power from across North America. In short, one Green Tag is produced each time a unit of electricity is generated from renewable sources, like solar, wind and biomass. We figure that one round trip from New York to Zurich generates about 4200 lbs of CO2 per person, or three Green Tags.
The good news is that when you travel with Ryder Walker, you can take comfort in the fact that we’re doing everything we can to make your trip as carbon-neutral as possible based on the data and the technology that’s available today. This is just a small step but we believe that it’s a necessary one.
Some other initiatives at Ryder-Walker:
Alternative Transportation
Seventy-Five Percent of our office staff commmute by methods other than the automobile. The most frequent modes of transport at RW are bicycling, walking and telecommuting.
Hybrid Technology
Our Founder and CEO, Peter Walker, uses a Toyota Prius anytime driving is required.
Recycling
The old standby. We’ve been doing it for years.
These are just small steps but like Ben Franklin once mused, “Little strokes fell great oaks.” If you have any ideas that might help us to shine the green light a little brighter then please contact us. We’d love to hear from you.
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