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Toshiba is offering its laptop customers the chance to opt into one of the more worthy carbon offset schemes. For £1.18, Toshiba customers can offset the manufacture, transportation and use of their laptop through a forest-creation project at Sand Martin Wood in Cumbria, carried out in partnership with offset company co2balance
Carbon offsetting may not be for everyone. George Monbiot, for instance, argues that purchasing carbon credits is like purchasing indulgences.
But if you are going to do it, do it right. Too many carbon offset schemes, demanding a quick ‘carbon credits’ return, focus on planting fast-growing pines and eucalyptus in vast monocultures. It’s great to see a scheme in the UK focusing on returning native trees to our fields. The Sand Martin Wood scheme will see oak, ash, beech, willow and cherry planted in former agricultural land, half-way between the Lake District and Northumberland National Park.
Incidentally, the Forestry Commission is also recognising that there are too many non-indigenous trees, so it’s letting one of the Lake District’s most extreme monocultures, Ennerdale, return to a wild wood in the hope of diversifying the ecology. And in Scotland, Trees for Life is planting broadleaves and some native pines in attempt to restore the Caledonian forest that once covered the Highlands.
Toshiba’s scheme is not the first to offset computer manufacture against carbon sequestration. Dell earlier this year announced its own offset scheme -- Plant A Tree For Me -- in which laptop customers could make a $2 donation, and desktop buyers a $6 donation to plant a tree to reduce the computer’s CO2 footprint during its lifespan.
We wonder, however, why the offset burden should be placed solely on the buyer. This should be a great opportunity for Toshiba and Dell to take the lead and plant a tree for every laptop they sell rather than shifting the responsibility from producer to consumer. Then they can claim to be truly committed to the environmental impact of their products they sell.
Correction: We have changed the first paragraph of this article to clarify how the offset cost is spent. £1.18 does not directly pay for a single tree to offset your laptop, but goes towards the Sand Martin Wood project.
Photo: Courtesy of Toshiba Europe GmbH
06 January 2008 08:52pm
This is all good in the sense that it gives us the chance to balance out the strain on the Earth that this product has had during manufacture etc but is it just me or shouldn't Toshiba be the ones paying to offset the emmisons produced from their own products; they profit from an item that damages the environment and then expect the customer to pay for their irresponsible actions??
I think their needs to be negotiation for these sorts of issues...
25 January 2008 02:38pm
Hang on a minute, has anyone actually worked out if the planting of a tree for £1.30 actually offsets the laptop - I cant make the figures work. For £1.30 they must be planting one tree for atleast a couple of laptops purely for the cost of land, but if you work out the power consumption of a laptop with a 75w power supply its about 500kw/h over the 3 year life, a mature tree can only offset 750kilos of CO2 in its lifetime so thats one tree per laptop not counting the fact that they say they are covering the footprint of manufacturing and delivery aswell......I think this is very misleading
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