Exetel Carbon Offsets
Calculating the Carbon Footprint
75% of Exetel's total carbon footprint is from the use of electricity for our servers and other equipment, which can be summarized as:
Office................................24,000 KWh per year
Powertel POP....................84,096 KWh per year
Verizon POP.......................8,700 KWh per year
Melbourne POP..................5,000 KWh per year
Brisbane POP.....................5,000 KWh per year
TOTAL..126,796 KWh per year
Using the conversion factor of 1 KWh/year to 0.43 kg of emissions, Exetel's power usage footprint is 54.52 tonnes per year. Exetel's total carbon footprint is 72.7 tonnes per year.
How Carbon Emissions Can Be Offset
The Kyoto protocol (and its successors) provide rules for how carbon emissions can be offset with 'credits' in various ways through carbon sinks – that is, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
In its simplest form, planting trees is an effective way to remove carbon dioxide. One tonne of forest growth will use about three tonnes of CO2.
Under Kyoto rules, the planting of the tree itself does not generate an offset, rather, the long term management, forest growth, diversity and maintenance of planting projects are calculated to arrive at, over a period of time, the net offset.
The total period to get full offset credit through tree planting is 70 to 100 years.
Typically, a tree planted today as part of a well managed and maintained forestry project may return the first offset in five years, but may take one hundred years to realize the full offset credit potential.
But that is ok, because, greenhouse emissions have been increasing since the industrial revolution. A trend of three hundred years can not be redressed in just a few years or decades. Though it is a much longer term than most people today are used to thinking about, a start has to be made somewhere.
Planting trees now is for the benefit of our children and grandchildren, and their children and grandchildren in turn.
