Tree Planting at Valley Northern
Posted in: Helping Harry's Planet 5th September 2022
Valley Northern has joined a tree planting subscription service and we now have our very own forest!
Well, we have 250 saplings planted … but it’s a start.
There’s a new phrase that you will no doubt become more accustomed to over the forthcoming months and years and that’s the ‘Greener NHS’. We’ll write more about this huge subject soon but in-short the NHS wants to be carbon net-zero by 2045, and that includes the entire supply chain. Everyone.
Like you, this is already front and centre of our minds at Valley Northern. Carbon reduction (and other environmental issues) are already influencing all of our decisions, including the materials that are used in our products, how they are used and how we get them to you. We all have a crucial part to play in helping the NHS to reach net-zero and aligning ourselves with NHS goals is of course a key step.
Climate Action...
... is also a phrase that we’ll no doubt become more accustomed to in the very near future. That’s looking outside of our normal day-to-day activities and asking ourselves where we can make a difference. There’s too much carbon in the atmosphere and it’s causing the planet to heat up, we need to reduce our emissions but we also need to capture what’s already there, we need to take action.
There are many organisations now focussed on tree planting (for carbon capture) but we chose Ecologi particularly because the start-up story inspired our team and they clearly have values very much aligned to those of Valley Northern.
It all started with a cup of coffee in 2018. Ecologi’s founder was buying his daily coffee on the way to work (clearly an unnecessary spend) and wondered if it might be better spent on climate action instead. He further wondered what would happen if a large percentage of the population did the same. He wondered why everyone wasn’t using their spare change to help the world get out of the crisis.
He then looked for a subscription service who could take his spare change, add it to the spare change of others and turn it into collective climate action. He was disappointed to find that one didn’t exist, so Ecologi was born.
Fast forward to 2022 and Ecologi are planting 100,000 trees a day – all funded by subscription. But here’s the funny thing … the subscribers would not say they’re giving to charity (in fact Ecologi is not a charity – more on that later). If you were in a holed boat, desperately trying to bail out water alongside your fellow passengers, you’re unlikely to view your own efforts as a charitable act largely because you’re all going to sink.
From an individual subscriber to a FTSE 100 business, everyone gets an online forest with Ecologi. From there you can see the projects that have been funded in your name, it’s such a clever way for the subscriber to see the direct and tangible benefits of their subscription and really feel part of it. Some of those projects prevent greenhouse gasses (GHG’s) in the first place (such as building solar energy schemes) and some capture GHG’s which have already been released into the atmosphere, you can easily see what’s happening in your very own forest.
Ecologi, it’s important to mention, is not a charity, it’s a private business. Their rationale for this is that it allows them to gain investment and super-charge their operations much faster than they could as a charity – they certainly appear to be meticulous in terms of their reporting and transparency as if they were a charity. They even produce a voluntary and detailed finance report.
You may be reassured by the fact that 85p in every pound goes directly to climate action with the remaining 15p funding the running of the business. They believe that running it as a business will speed everything up – because we’re running out of time.
They now feel that they can call it a ‘movement’, a clarion call for everyone to get involved. As the numbers of individuals and businesses who subscribe increases then so does the tree planting and other projects designed to reduce emissions of GHG’s. Right now they believe that their current activities have led to a 0.02% reduction of emissions globally, their stated goal though is (incredibly) to reduce projected global emissions by half by 2040.
We love trees at Valley Northern and we’re looking forward to growing our forest,
Why do we love them? Well they do a great job of storing carbon.
In fact by the time a tree is fully grown half of the chemical composition of the wood is carbon. As the tree grows, it is able to lock away the carbon in its branches, roots and trunk, playing a key role in combating the effects of global warming. Trees are the best carbon capture technology in the world. When they perform photosynthesis, they pull carbon dioxide out of the air, bind it up in sugar, and release oxygen. So it follows that if we plant more trees (as long as it’s done properly, in the right locations, at the right time, on the right land with the right species – there’s lots of caveats here) that would be a good thing.
You can visit our forest here.
