Carbon Neutral Websites

Southern Designs is a design agency with responsibility. We work with COCO2.org to offset our carbon footprints caused by hosting everywebsite for a year. COCO automatically make a donation and/or purchase carbon offsets to offset the impact of registered websites on the environment. A typical web server can generate over 2 tonnes of carbon per year. We intentionally over invest in carbon offsets to ensure the emmissions generated by our registered users websites are reduced or negated elsewhere.

 

What is Carbon (CO2) Offsetting?

Carbon Offsetting is a method by which you can minimise your impact on the environment. For every ton of CO2 your activities produce you can reduce somebody else's activities by the same amount.

For example, if the electricity generated that your website consumes is equivelant to 1 ton of CO2 emmitted per year then we could plant trees that take 1 ton of carbon out of the atmosphere.

 

What are the benefits of offsetting?

You will help balance the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere by paying someone to reduce their CO2 output or taking CO2 out of the environment by investing in forestry.

 

Why don't I just change my energy supplier to a carbon neutral supplier?

We would encourage you to do this, this will have a significant impact on your CO2 emmissions, however, unless your website is running of a server that is within your house or business it will not make the your website carbon neutral.

 

What do you do with my contribution?

A proportion of your money will be placed into a fund, that is then used on a quarterly basis to offset your carbon emmissions. Coco2.org spread the money across a minimum of 3 carbon offsetters and invest in a range of projects from planting trees in the county of Devon in the UK though to supplier low income villagers in South Africa with energy efficient lighting. We know that the broader the range of products we invest in the greater our overall imapct will be. We publish on a quarterly basis how many tonnes we have offset and what www.coco2.org registrants have contributed.

 

Why should I worry about global warming?

We don't want to scare you, but we do want you take actions to reduce and offset your CO2 output. Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas in our atmosphere.

If the human race, continues to pump out carbon with no offsetting at it's current rate the earth is likely to warm unsustainably. The increase in temperature is likely to raise sea levels flooding major cities and countries across the globe. Large agriculturally productive areas of our planet are likley to turn to dessert, and fresh water will be harder to find. So to summarise, if we do nothing, we are liekly to see flooding, starvation and droughts on a global scale….get it!

 

How do you work out what the CO2 emmissions for my activities are?

There is more detail in our terms and conditions. Put simply we work on averages. We know how many tonnes of carbon the average servers energy consumption creates and we know on average how many sites there are per server. The math is simple. We then over commit so if for instance we believe that the average CO2 output from a shared server is 0.8 tonnes we ask you to offset 1 tonne.

Richard Branson has recently pledged to invest £1.6bn over the next decade to combat global warming and promote alternative energy. Now, we can't exactly match Richard's efforts, but we still believe our achievements will have an impact on the environment, no matter how big or small!

 

"If I was going to die tomorrow I would plant a tree today "
Dr Martin Luther King

 

For every website we build, you will be offered the chance to go carbon neutral, from as little as £6 per year !

Southern Designs are constantly looking at a whole range of solutions for how we can become more carbon neutral.

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