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Carbonfund.org and Avis Announce New Alliance

Carbonfund.org and Avis Budget Group, parent company of Avis Rent A Car and Budget Rent A Car, have announced an alliance through which Avis Budget Group will offer its corporate and retail customers a variety of carbon offset options to minimize the environmental impact of their vehicle rentals.

The new program will offer Avis and Budget customers flexible options to offset based on the length of their rental. For a $1.25 Daily offset, Carbonfund.org will offset 300 pounds of CO2. A Weekly for $5 will offset 1200 pounds, while a Monthly offset will cost $20 and will offset 4800 pounds.

The alliance with Avis is the latest in a string of partnerships between Cabonfund.org and nationally-recognized transportation brand names, including JetBlue, Amtrak, Orbitz, and others. “We are very pleased to work with a company such as Avis Budget Group, which is extremely conscious of its environmental impact,” said Carbonfund.org Executive Director Eric Carlson. “Together we will be able to make a positive impact on the future of the environment and set a standard for offsetting emissions for rental cars.”

Carlson will take advantage of the carbon offset option when he travels to Los Angeles next week for the National Business Travel Association Conference on an all-CarbonFree trip. His trip will be covered in posts to the Carbonfund.org blog.

“At Avis Budget Group, we are very concerned with how our business affects the environment,” said Ronald L. Nelson, chairman and chief executive officer, Avis Budget Group. “Teaming up with Carbonfund.org will help us advance our efforts to reduce the environmental impact of our fleet.”

The alliance with Carbonfund.org adds to the many environmental initiatives of Avis Budget Group, which is already partnering with its corporate customers to assist them with their individual carbon reduction targets. The company is also creating a formal environmental management system (EMS), which is being designed to measure and manage environmental aspects of the Company’s operations in accordance with International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14001 guidelines. The EMS will cover air, water and land quality issues, landfill contributions, resource depletion and conservation, solid/liquid waste, odor/noise emissions and other environmental aspects.

Avis Budget Group also offers its customers a variety of vehicle choices for reducing environmental impact. Out of a fleet of more than 375,000 vehicles, 63 percent of the fleet is US EPA SmartWay Certified and 25 percent of the fleet is rated at 32 miles per gallon or better. The fleet also includes a large selection of gas/electric hybrid vehicles for rent in compact, full-size and small SUV car classes.

Carbonfund.org Blog Presents How We Drive Now: Tips and Analysis

To accompany the launch of the Avis and Budget rental program, The Carbonfund.org Blog will offer a series of posts discussing the current state and future of driving in America. Topics will include:

eTolling: What is this smart new idea, and how is Avis leading the pack on promoting it?
Can GPS devices save energy? At least one environmental thought leader thinks so.
Fuel prices: will they every go back to where they were? Also: the cost of fuel vs. the cost of offsets.
Smart driving tips to help you make the most of every gallon.

Visit The Carbonfund.org Blog for these and frequently updated coverage and commentary on carbon offsets, global warming, and other environmental topics.

LayFlats Music & Arts Festival Moves Quickly To Be CarbonFree

LayFlats Music and Arts Festival is only in its second year, but already the celebration of local culture in West Lafayette, IN, is taking big steps to mitigate its environmental impact. This year, founders Johnny Klemme and Travis Easter are focused on making recycling bins ubiquitous, and encouraging carpooling, bicycling, and public transit, and offsetting the event’s carbon impact.

Through Carbonfund.org’s CarbonFree Events program, they are offsetting the festival’s likely carbon footprint and then some.

Known locally as LayFlats, the LayFlats Arts and Music Festival is an annual outdoor music and arts festival held at the Tippecanoe Outdoor Amphitheater in West Lafayette, Indiana. This multi-day family festival takes place at a 160 acre wooded park with proceeds supporting local charities to benefit children’s art therapy, outreach and support programs. The festival, scheduled for September 12-13, features 60 bands of a variety of musical styles on five stages, various music and arts workshops, and local food.

“We’ve all been involved in the art and music scenes in West Lafayette,” said Klemme, “and there had never been a festival focused solely on local art and music. This city’s full of talented people who deserve recognition, so we took it upon ourselves to make it happen.”

The Art of the Wine Négociant Returns With Cameron Hughes Wine

Cameron Hughes Wine doesn’t own any vineyards, yet it offers exceptional wine at reasonable prices. How? Through what is essentially a form of recycling—taking excess wine from some of the best vineyards in the country, bottling it, and selling it directly to wine drinkers.

This is the way of the négociant, the French term for a winemaker who assembles the product of other growers and winemakers and sells the result under its own name. Historically, négociants were the dominant force in the wine business, connecting owners of vineyards and wineries with the wine-buying public.

In the past twenty-five years, other business models have succeeded in the wine world, but Cameron Hughes Wine has created its own niche. Founder Cameron Hughes entered the wine business at a young age, and he uses his contacts to find out which wineries have too much high-quality wine. Cameron Hughes Wine then acts quickly to “rescue” it before it is blended into lesser wines. The advantage of the low overhead of this unique business model allows Cameron Hughes Wine to offer super-premium wine and make it available at exceptional prices as part of its Lot series.

This strategy has earned the company lots of positive press and growth, and Cameron Hughes Wine recognizes that as its business grows, so too does its impact on the environment. The company relies heavily on shipping services to receive wines from around the globe and make customer deliveries across the country. Cameron Hughes Wine decided that if it really wanted to break down the “true” cost of the wine, the environmental impact should be factored into the equation.

Using calculators developed by Carbonfund.org, Cameron Hughes Wine tallied up the emissions generated by its business as a result of travel, freight and customer shipping activities and signed on to the CarbonFree Program to offset its emissions. By offsetting 150,000 cases of wine—or 1.8 million bottles—Cameron Hughes Wine is the first American wine négociant company to be 100 percent carbon neutral.

“Three years ago we looked in ways we could take responsibility for the carbon emissions resulting from the production and logistics of our wine. Carbonfund.org provided the most straight-forward turn-key program available for us to quantify our emissions and purchase offsets,” said Hughes. “We think Carbonfund.org takes an innovative approach to managing carbon offset programs and they make it easy for companies like ours to get involved.”

A Revolution in Paper: Tree-free Paper from Natural Source Printing

Everyone knows paper is made from trees and that recycling paper reduces the number of trees that need to be cut down, but wood pulp isn’t the only component of paper. Traditional paper also contains up to 30% calcium carbonate, an abundant mineral with many industrial applications.

That fact prompted Mary Loyer to ask herself these questions: Is there another option to recycling paper? What other eco-friendly materials are available? Why not sell paper made not from trees at all, but mostly from calcium carbonate? Thus was born Natural Source Printing Inc, which Loyer founded in 2007. Among the many eco-friendly materials it offers for packaging, printing, and marketing materials, FiberStone™ Paper—made with no trees—has become its flagship product.

FiberStone Paper is made from 80% calcium carbonate and 20% non-toxic resin (HDPE) High Density Polyethylene. According to Natural Source Printing, FiberStone Paper requires zero trees and no water to manufacture. The calcium carbonate comes from limestone collected as waste material from existing quarries for the building and construction industry. For comparison, a ton of recycled paper uses four trees, generates two tons of waste, and requires 9,000 gallons of water.

Natural Source Printing joined the CarbonFree Small Business Program to further its commitment to the environment. “Carbonfund.org fit a number of the parameters we were searching for,” said Loyer. “It’s a not-for-profit, which means it’s mission driven with no ulterior motives. I’ve always loved the motto—Reduce What You Can, Offset Set What You Can’t—and I promote it to all my clients.”

Natural Source Printing offers consulting services to help match companies find that material that furthers their goals and complements their messages. “The way for green to work for companies is for it to make sense within the way they do business,” said Loyer. “Some companies might think it would be hard to do, but when I speak to a client, it’s a matter of finding the right material to fit their marketing campaign, and to make it clear to their customer how they are doing their part.”

Come Home from Summer Vacation to a Mailbox without Junk Mail

The average American gets 41 pounds of junk mail a year – credit card offers, insurance promotions, coupon packets, sweepstakes entries, and more. But the junk mail is more than just an unneeded headache. It’s a huge waste of time and natural resources.

The deluge of junk mail is never more apparent than when it’s time to sort through the mail after returning from a summer vacation. Wouldn’t it be nice to come home from relaxing and find only mail that you actually want or need?

Did you know:
• More than 100 million trees are destroyed each year to create junk mail.
• Junk mail produces more greenhouse gas emissions than 2.8 million cars.
• Junk mail wastes 28 billion gallons of water annually.
• The average adult spends 70 hours a year dealing with junk mail.
• The world’s temperate forests absorb 2 billion tons of carbon annually to help keep the planet cool and healthy.

This summer, you can stop your household’s junk mail and unwanted catalogs, thanks to Carbonfund.org partner 41pounds.org. 41pounds.org stops household junk mail by contacting dozens of direct mail companies to remove everyone in your household from marketing lists. You’ll also keep more trees in the forest doing what they do best—providing oxygen for us to breathe and absorbing carbon to cool the planet.

And when you sign up with 41pounds.org to stop your junk mail, 41pounds.org will donate $15 to Carbonfund.org, which will go toward renewable energy and reforestation projects.

“If each of us makes small changes that improve our daily lives and improve the health of the planet, imagine the collective impact we can have together,” says 41pounds.org co-founder Sander DeVries. “We founded 41pounds.org as a nonprofit service to stop the deluge of junk mail and catalogs, and to provide a simple, meaningful way for people to reduce our impact on the environment.”

ONNO Textiles Moves Beyond Conventional Cotton

Jack Kanefield has been in the shirt business for a long time. For years he worked with factories doing contract manufacturing for big names like Reebok, Nike, Speedo—all using conventional cotton. At the time, he didn’t give the material type much thought.

Times have changed.

After he started reading about the harm that conventional cotton does, Kanefield ceased operations with his conventional cotton clothing company. He sold off pieces of it to fund a new business, ONNO Textiles, dedicated to offering organic and alternative fabric shirts.
At ONNO, conventional cotton isn’t even an option. Three exceptional materials—organic cotton, bamboo, and hemp—have replaced it. These materials have eco-friendly advantages: they use less water and require no pesticides.

ONNO shows its commitment to social responsibility in other ways, too. Carbon offsets have long been part of ONNO’s strategy. “We always knew we’d do carbon offsets,” said Kanefield. “We called around and spoke with various companies, but we were much more comfortable with a not-for-profit like Carbonfund.org. Otherwise, how would we know how much of our money actually goes into the offsets?”

Conventional cotton is grown with pesticides and insecticides, which end up in soil and water where they can find their way into the food chain, accumulating in the cells of living organisms, including people. Organic cotton, on the other hand, is grown on fields that have been chemical-free for at least three years. Farmers use composted manures and cover-crops to replace synthetic fertilizers. Innovative weeding strategies are used instead of herbicides. Beneficial insects and trap-crops are used to control pests. Nature’s frost and water inducement prepare plants for harvest, instead of using toxic defoliants.

Markmakers Opens the World of Charitable Giving to Children

Typically, philanthropy is an adult activity. After all, adults have the money. Adults have the time to research and choose where to donate that money from among the bewildering number of worthy charities, causes, and organizations.

Markmakers is the result of one family’s desire to open the world of charitable giving to children. Its innovative website introduces children to the concept of charitable giving and social activism by giving them a safe environment in which to make their first charitable donations, including the option of offsetting carbon with Carbonfund.org.

Here’s how it works: an adult—a parent or grandparent, perhaps, or a friend of the family or other benefactor—purchases a Markmakers card and, after taking the opportunity to write a personal thought on giving, sends it to the young recipient. The recipient then logs onto Markmaker.org and explores a number of different charitable possibilities in six categories, including Poverty, Disease, Animal Welfare, Kids in Need, the Environment, and Peace & Justice.

“Parents often donate in the name of their children, but that’s hardly the same thing as letting a child choose from different causes, make a decision to commit their money,” said Markmakers President Eric Garfinkel.

The Markmakers website allows children to make an informed decision and control the giving process. There are no links from Markmakers to any other website so a child can explore the site and read about the different causes and needs without traveling to a place where she might end up on a mailing list. All giving through Markmakers is anonymous, and the names of the children and card purchasers are not passed to any organization.

The Girls in the Vineyard: School Fundraiser Grows Into Something Much Bigger

Sometimes a good idea grows beyond any expectations. That’s what happened to The Girls in the Vineyard. The Napa Valley winery started out as a school fundraiser but has turned into a successful business with a unique twist on charitable donations—one that offers wine lovers a generous way to support Carbonfund.org.

The Girls in the Vineyard is the product of Rob and Kat McDonald and Matt Stone. (The McDonalds are Australian, and in Australia it’s common for winemakers to refer to their vines as girls: hence the name.)

Carbon News Roundup

The Group of Eight countries ended its latest summit this week by agreeing to try to halve greenhouse gasses by 2050, reports the Washington Post. This marked the first time that the United States has joined other industrialized countries in pledging to reduce carbon by a fixed amount by a certain time. Environmentalists criticized the agreement’s targets as weak and vague, noting that fundamental differences between the countries were not addressed.

The volume of carbon traded globally in the first half of 2008 nearly matched the total volume traded 2007, according to Reuters. 1.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide were traded in the first six months of the year, with the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme accounting for 70% of transactions by volume. Point Carbon, a carbon market analysis firm, said the global carbon market was worth 38 billion euros ($59.5 billion) in the first half of 2008, compared to 40 billion euros for all of 2007.

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