How we offset

Whilst there are many options when it comes to obtaining offsets, we feel that the best method of offsetting our carbon emissions is through the planting of trees. In this, we have chosen GreenFleet to plant trees on our behalf. We utilise their conversions from CO2-e to a tree cost.

Website Activity

Part of minimising our impact on the environment is to keep track of the resources used, visitors to the website and then calculate our expectation of carbon emissions, both our website hosts, and our own in house work is powered by 100% Greenpower. In terms of aToMik Green's electricity, we use 100% Wind Power as provided by Origin Energy. We feel that part of our responsibility in providing a website for your information is to take responsibility of the carbon emissions whilst you do this.

In order to give this meaning, we make some assumptions. We have measured the average power consumption by a computer with an LCD monitor, and a pair of powered speakers. Whilst it averaged around 90 Watts, we rounded this up to 100 Watts per computer. We also made an assumption that the average time someone spends on our website is one hour. Using the standard conversion calculation from Watts to kWh (W x h / 1000), each user is assumed to have consumed 0.1kWh whilst viewing our website. We also use the Australian average Carbon Co-efficient which is 1kg CO2-e per kWh. In essence, this means that each visitor to our website produces 100 grams of CO2  during each 1 hour session.

We have been monitoring our website traffic since the site launched on March 27, 2008 and below you will find those statistics and the emissions we will be taking responsibility for.

Manufacture, Shipping and Storage

Currently, we are unable to determine the specific "carbon cost" of each item produced and manufactured for the aToMik Green website. The difficulty lies in knowing the full production processes used in manufacturing plants not required to monitor their energy usage. Whilst this is an unknown, there is information available that we have used to determine the cost of shipping goods to us in Australia. We have again made assumptions, but these are based on the absolute worst case scenario - in this case we are using figures based on sending dairy products from New Zealand to the United Kingdom. The figures take into account transportation being refrigerated, which our products do not require.

Utilising these figures, the transportation process requires 0.114 MJ per kilogram of freight. To obtain the Carbon Co-efficient, we multiply this is 0.007 kg CO2-e / MJ. This works out to 80 grams of CO2-e per 100 kg of Freight.

Since the Carbon Cost of transporting a product to Australia would be less than 1 gram per 1 kilogram (based on figures of refrigerated transport from NZ to UK), we have decided to put a carbon cost of 1kg CO2-e  per 1kg of product that we either import, or obtain locally. We feel that this more than covers the cost of production, even ignoring the fact that the majority of our products are designed to reduce the impact on the environment.

As of 4th October, 2010, we have offset our importation and local delivery carbon costs with the planting of 93 trees.