UK Skydive offer a Carbon Offset programme.
When you purchase your Flight Tickets you will be offered the opportunity to add £2 to each ticket in accordance with our Carbon Offset programme. At the end of the year we will offer Members the choice of three or four established offset programmes, and the membership will choose which one to donate the accumulated fund to.
UK Skydive is not charging any administration fees to this programme and as a charity donation; it is not subject to Vat.
Why Carbon Offset?
Carbon offsets encourage individuals and businesses to take responsibility for their part in global climate change. Offsets don't excuse excess, but if viewed as aid for people and the environment, they can be beneficial. Perhaps more importantly, the popularity of voluntary offsets could help promote a carbon market or a carbon tax backed by public policy.
As people and businesses become more aware of their own contributions to global warming, some turn to carbon offsets as a way to go neutral.
A customer's personal carbon output is estimated and the total GHG produced on each skydive is calculated at approx £2.
Offset companies charge an amount based on their own GHG price per ton. The money funds programs that offset an equal amount of emissions.
What is it?
With bands like Coldplay and Pink Floyd releasing carbon-neutral albums, airlines like Silverjet claiming carbon neutrality and a growing troop of celebrities trumpeting their low-carbon lifestyles, a person might wonder how they all do it. How do bands, businesses and people cancel out what seems like an unavoidable emission? Carbon neutrality begins with reduction. It's a concentrated effort to produce less waste and use more renewable energy. After reduction has reached its limit, or its comfortable threshold, carbon offsets can make up for the rest.
Carbon offsets are a form of trade. When you buy an offset, you fund projects that reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The projects might restore forests, update power plants and factories or increase the energy efficiency of buildings and transportation. Carbon offsets let you pay to reduce the global GHG total instead of making radical or impossible reductions of your own. GHG emissions mix quickly with the air and, unlike other pollutants, spread around the entire planet. Because of this, it doesn't really matter where GHG reductions take place if fewer emissions enter the atmosphere.
Carbon offsets are voluntary. People and businesses buy them to reduce their carbon footprints or build up their green image. Carbon offsets can counteract specific activities like air travel and driving or events like weddings and conferences.
The Theory
GHG emissions are a global problem. Carbon offsets operate on the idea that any reduction in any area is worthwhile. Yet it's much cheaper to reduce or absorb emissions in developing or transitional regions of the world. Currencies might be weaker or supplies less expensive. Logistically, it is easier to make changes in an area that does not already have a developed infrastructure.
Offsets, however, are somewhat of a luxury. You are, after all, paying for non-emissions -- something that doesn't even exist. Because of this, most people who purchase offsets live in developed nations where drastically lowering domestic emissions is difficult and expensive. A business or household might find buying offsets more economical than retrofitting a building or eliminating auto emissions. With the planet as a whole producing about 25 billion tons of CO2 per year, it doesn't really matter if a reforestation project in Ecuador gets its funding from an Ecuadorian banker or an English DZ.
Carbon offsets fund projects like forest planting, conversion to renewable energy sources or GHG collection and sequestration. Offsets support both large-scale and community projects. A single company might restore a forest in Uganda and support the construction of efficient stoves in Honduran villages.
The Bad Stuff
Greenhouse gases trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere. Cars, planes, power plants and factories all emit GHG. The Kyoto Protocol, an international GHG agreement, defines six troubling types of emissions:
- Carbon dioxide (CO2): When fossil fuels, waste and plant matter burn, they emit CO2, the most common GHG emission.
- Methane (CH4): Landfills, livestock, agricultural activities and the production of coal, natural gas and oil all generate CH4, an emission far more powerful than CO2.
- Nitrous oxide (N2O): Sewage treatment and the combustion of fossil fuels both produce N2O. However, fertilizer and agricultural soil management release the majority of this potent emission.
- Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6): The electric power industry uses this man-made compound for insulation and current interruption.
- Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs): Solvents, refrigerants, firefighting agents and propellants for aerosols use HFCs as a replacement for ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).
- Perfluorocarbons (PFCs): There are relatively low amounts of PFCs in the atmosphere, but they're hard to get rid of. The estimated atmospheric life of this solvent and component of aluminum production ranges from 10,000 to 50,000 years!
