In today's corporate world, it's important to consider the environmental footprint of our decisions. This guide is designed to help provide you with handy tips as to how to minimise your impact on the environment whilst continuing to do business. This is not meant to be patronising nor draconian - simply easy tips to think about when travelling.
Tip 1: Don't waste. A common sense approach to going through life will take you a long way. Getting to and from the airport - if you are travelling with colleagues and travelling by car then consider sharing. A taxi share service is also run out of London Paddington station. At the airport lounge - don't take food you aren't going to eat; replace magazines if you aren't going to read them again;recycle where possible. At the hotel - reuse towels if possible, don't leave your air conditioning/tv/lights on when you leave the room.
Tip 2: Take public transport where possible. Many of the world's airports have strict environmental targets so they actively encourage the use of public transport and discourage private travel. You may find that public transport systems (at least part of the way) can be more convenient and, more importantly, quicker than private car alternatives. For example, the Heathrow Express (www.heathrowexpress.com) takes you into central London within 15 minutes. Even if you jump in a taxi from there, you would have saved yourself time, money and the environment. Other countries such as Hong Kong have an equally fast service whilst others, such as New York or Shanghai, still have some way to go. However, Shanghai's Maglev train will take you at lightening speeds to the outskirts of downtown Shanghai.
Tip 3: Minimise flying time. It stands to reason that the more time you spend up in the air, the more carbon you will be responsible for. Therefore, check the routing of your proposed flight. Direct flights will have less impact than if you connect on the way to you final destination. I would make some caveats to this point though, often the connecting routing may more or less be en-route, for example, flying Emirates to Asia from Europe. In this case, a connection may not be as bad as say a UK to US route via Europe. You can use the flight times as an indicator.
Tip 4: Pick more efficient aircraft. As a rule of thumb, the more modern the aircraft, the more efficient the aircraft, the less impact it has on the environment. There are a number of airlines who are currently pushing for an emission based aviation tax scheme (particularly in the UK) which would result in a financial incentive to travel on less polluting aircraft. However, until that time, look out for airlines who are running newer aircraft. These typically are the Middle Eastern carriers and low cost carriers, however, many on the flag carriers continue to renew their fleet regularly. If you are really interested, the emissions per aircraft can be found on www.boeing.com and www.airbus.com
Tip 5: Carbon offset. This one is slightly more controversial as the benefits of such schemes are often questioned. However, the concept behind carbon offsetting is that a project will be financed by carbon offsetters (usually in a developing country) which would absorb carbon. As a result, your carbon impact on the environment will be offset and you will be carbon neutral. Many of the airlines (BA, Virgin and Silverjet to name a few) now offer on-board or pre-purchased carbon offsetting vouchers. Do note that as we are taking up more space on the aircraft, business class travellers are calculated to create more carbon than economy passengers. If your airline doesn't offer this service, check out www.carbonneutral.com for more details. Doing your bit for the environment is not necessarily about big gestures. We all have to travel for business, there is nothing we can do about that, however, with the above simple tips, I hope that together, we can reduce our impact.
