BGlobal Warming: The Business Response

Travel remains one of the strongest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, with air travel alone said to contribute two percent of all emissions. Hence, Intrepid Travel, a business that prides itself on the eco-friendly nature of its tourism business, has been one of the first to pursue a path to become carbon neutral.

While the company had long been concerned with its own energy consumption, the strong focus on climate change in the media last year prompted by the film An Inconvenient Truth and Australian writer Tim Flannery’s book The Weather Makers, further heightened the interest of the company’s director and co-founder, Darrell Wade. The company had already been receiving communication from clients asking what its climate strategy was. Intrepid appointed a full-time staff member, Lisa Patterson, to the position of carbon offset manager, and declared that it would be a carbon neutral business by 2010. "We really realised what was happening out there, and the impact our industry was having," Patterson says.

In January this year, Intrepid introduced an additional carbon offset charge on all flights sold from Australia. It was a brave decision, which added as much as $50 to the price of a ticket to Bangkok, and it had an immediate impact on flight bookings.

But, despite a drop off in January and February, the trend in bookings has been moving consistently upwards. Patterson says that by explaining the program—such as how a flight to Bangkok produces emissions equivalent to driving a car for a year—the company has won back many clients.

The company also used its green ethos in marketing, offering to refund the cost of admission for anyone who handed in a ticket stub to An Inconvenient Truth. Intrepid refunded nearly 10,000 tickets.

Carbon Neutral

Even large consumers of energy can take a green path. The 14-person Perth-based company ilisys runs a data centre hosting data and websites for around 18,000 small businesses, which consumes around 200,000 kilowatt hours of electricity each year.

At Christmas the team went off together to see An Inconvenient Truth. Management then posed the question to staff of what the organisation should be doing in response. In February, ilisys announced that it had become the first data centre in Australia to become carbon neutral. The company’s director of product development, Matt Mulligan, says the decision was born of a sense within the company that it was using more power than it should.

"We were quite efficient in many areas of our business, but we looked at power as something that was a bit of a freebie," Mulligan says.

The company has gone through a number of steps to reach its green status. It started by reorganising its data centre to boost its efficiency, upgrading PC monitors to flat-screen LCD panels, and implementing policies such as ensuring that machines were switched off when not in use.

The next step was switching over to 100 percent green electricity from WA-based supplier Synergy at the beginning of the year. Mulligan says this pushed up the cost of power from $0.15 per kilowatt-hour to $0.18 per kilowatt hour, but says the company has been able to absorb the increase.

What he didn’t expect was the strong response from clients, but says it is too early to determine whether the decision has assisted in growing the business. "People were really excited that a supplier that was close to their business was doing something, and they felt as a result that they could do something to," Mulligan says. "It’s good for our business to be using less power, and it’s good for us to be saying that to our customers.

"I imagine that as time passes people are going to be looking to suppliers to be genuinely serious about the environment."