Last Updated on September 9, 2022 by
With global emissions on the rise and climate change awareness rapidly increasing, business owners can no longer ignore the environmental issues and let someone handle them on their behalf. While they can try to do this, investors, customers, and staff members expect a business to be active in environmental issues. Carbon offsetting is considered to be one way your business can assist to benefit the planet. For a business that intends to lower its contribution to climate change, carbon offsetting is the best option. This post discusses the benefits of carbon offsetting.
Carbon offsetting
Carbon offsetting is simply a way you can try to balance out pollution. This happens through carbon offsets, which are activities that can neutralize carbon dioxide emissions by reducing the emissions elsewhere.
Carbon emission neutralization is achieved by buying carbon credits. Remember that one carbon credit can equal the reduction or absorption of one ton of carbon dioxide. Therefore, your business needs to pay someone else to get rid of a specific amount of greenhouse emissions from the atmosphere. This is an action that may contribute to carbon reduction across the globe.
Carbon offsetting can involve doing some projects, such as distributing cleaner-burning cookstoves, planting trees, and financing wind turbine generators. These projects can assist your business to contribute to environmentally friendly activities. The purchase of these carbon credits can also help these emissions to reduce while ensuring that the projects remain financially sustainable and viable. This is especially true for a business that cannot find funding by itself.
You should note that you can also utilize carbon offsetting in various ways. This includes compensating for the residual carbon footprint of your business after exhausting other options. You can also compensate for emissions that a specific product, event, project, building, or service created. Lastly, you can also compensate for emissions made by your supply chain.
Benefits of carbon offsetting
The good thing about participating in carbon offsetting is that you benefit from improved corporate social responsibility. There is a lot that corporate social responsibilities can do to help the environment. But it’s crucial to understand its role so that your business should not just focus on financial reasons. When your business is considered to be socially responsible, your shareholders, customers, and staff members can also approve. Simply put, corporate social responsibility can improve when it comes to positive brand visibility, public relations, and market leadership.
You can also create more opportunities for carbon reductions. In most cases, a business may not reduce a lot of its carbon emissions. This is because their footprint may already be small or even are in an industry that doesn’t have low-carbon options. Carbon offsetting allows your business to make up for the carbon emissions that it couldn’t neutralize.
Carbon offsetting can also help you to uncover supply chain problems. If your business happens to be part of a supply chain, carbon offsetting makes sure that you cannot experience problems with partners and suppliers on environmental issues. And, by uncovering and handling these issues that contribute to carbon emissions, you can save over time. You can then use these savings to purchase more carbon offsets.
Besides, carbon offsetting allows you to be aware of your spending. In other words, carbon offsetting may also give you an insight into how your business is spending money. For example, if you find out that your energy procurement budget has increased because of carbon offsetting, then you need to check how you can lower your energy usage at a base level. You should also note that you can lower your environmental impact from the onset. Ideally, you must figure out whether it’s necessary to spend your cash on carbon offsets or you can utilize the cash to lower carbon emissions yourself.
Read More: How to Keep Safe Your Environment by Using Carbon Offset App
It’s worth mentioning that carbon offsets can sometimes be tax deductible. For the most part, the presence of tax deductions can depend on whether buying carbon offsets is exclusively or wholly for the purpose of the trade. For example, your business can utilize the fact that it is offsetting carbon emissions just to attract more clients through its services or products. Therefore, you need to demonstrate that your spending is exclusively and wholly for trade purposes.
Likewise, your business can purchase carbon offsets because you are simply passionate about climate change, though you have not communicated your actions either internally or externally. In this case, it can be hard to demonstrate that your expenditure is exclusively and wholly for trade purposes.
There are many good examples of carbon offsetting projects. One of them is the forestry and conservation projects. Perhaps, this is one of the most popular offsetting schemes out there. Reforestation and conservation projects happen across the globe. These projects tend to be expensive, but they offer great benefits to the environment. The protection of social heritage, wildlife, and ecosystems can allow your business to contribute toward its corporate social responsibility.
Generating your electricity
The best way you can reduce your carbon footprint is by generating renewable energy. There are various things you need to consider before you decide to produce electricity.
One of the factors is the location of your business. Remember that the physical footprint and location of your business can have an impact on how you should and can produce your electricity. For instance, a business that is located on high ground or even by the sea can be a good idea to invest in wind turbines so that it can benefit from the high volume of renewable energy sources.
You should also note that the location can be suitable for harnessing more elements than you think. The UK has a tropical climate, but there are still adequate sunlight hours that you can use to produce a lot of electricity through a photovoltaic system. You just need the services of a specialist solar power installer to give you the right information or estimation of the electricity-generating potential of your location. The good news is sunlight is free, so your business can save on energy bills. As a result, you can use the money for other important things.
