Air Charter Service celebrates three years as Carbon Neutral

Nov. 30, 2009 - PRLog -- Air Charter Service is celebrating its third year of carbon off-setting as it recently renewed its carbon neutral status. The company off-sets CO2 emissions generated by its worldwide offices purchased through The CarbonNeutral Company and has so far managed over four and a half thousand tonnes since it started.

Carbon offsetting allows you to compensate for your unavoidable emissions by helping fund projects that deliver an equivalent CO2 saving elsewhere. The money raised helps fund projects such as hydro-electric power plants and wind farms around the world that reduce the amount of carbon emitted.

Through the programme, ACS off-sets emissions from its international operations, which are predominantly generated through staff business travel, between its offices in New York, London, Paris, Bilbao, Johannesburg, Moscow, Dubai, Hong Kong and Tokyo. The Edinburgh Centre of Carbon Management calculates how many tonnes of CO2 this equates to annually. ACS chose to partner with The CarbonNeutral Company because of its reputation, commitment to quality standard and transparency through PWC auditing its offset projects.

Tony Bauckham, Managing Director of ACS, said: “We are delighted to be continuing to off-set our emissions from our worldwide operations through The CarbonNeutral Company. We are extremely conscious of the impact of CO2 on the environment and feel it is essential that we play our part in helping to tackle the issue, particularly with the large amount of business travel we have to do as a company. Along with our off-setting in partnership with The CarbonNeutral Company, we are also trying to maximise and combine all business trips that we do, and cutting down on less necessary flights, therefore lessening our CO2 emissions further”.

Bauckham added: “We have been actively involved in a few schemes since becoming carbon neutral – our investment in these three very different projects has already helped off-set more than four and a half thousand tonnes of CO2 in total.”

The first in which ACS was involved was the Waste Gas Power Project, a methane capture project in the Rhine-Ruhr area of Germany. The methane capture comes from three disused coal mines in the Rhine-Ruhr valleys where methane is still escaping from the open mine shafts.

Then we invested in the Guizhou Hydro Power Project. This project sees the construction of a number of small and medium sized hydro power stations in Guizhou Province, Southern China. By providing renewable energy, the project will displace electricity generated by fossil fuel power plants.

And this year, we have been backing the Govindapurum Wind Power Project, in the state of Tamil Nadu in Southern India. This project enables the installation of four wind turbine generators to produce clean electricity, which is then either sold to the state electricity grid or sent to Patspin’s spinning factories in the Ponneri, Udumalpet, and Coimbatore districts.

”We have added three new offices to the ACS global network in 2009 and, as we continue to grow, we will carry on investing in these worthwhile environmental projects through The CarbonNeutral Company”, concluded Bauckham.

# # #

Air Charter Service is an air charter broker with a global network of 9 offices in North America, Europe, Africa, CIS, the Middle East and Asia.