Reducing our environmental impact

Jute plants growing in Bangladesh. Like all plants, they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
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Our carbon offset partners
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Canby's cloth bags are good for the environment: they are biodegradable and reusable alternatives to the blight of disposable plastic and paper. That's a good start, but we have to take all possible measures to reduce the environmental impact of our business. So we use low-emission sea freight and fuel-efficient pallet haulage to transport our bags. We recycle everything we can and we buy recycled products for the office. And even though jute absorbs carbon dioxide as it grows, it's impossible for us to operate without creating net emissions of greenhouse gases.

We have to take responsibility for these, so we offset them. There are many companies that offer carbon offset schemes.  Many employ a hotch-potch of long-term third world development schemes, expensive (and untested) carbon reduction technologies and programmes.They can spend up to half of their income on marketing and rewarding themselves, while most of the rest goes into the pockets of an army of consultants or the merchant bankers who own them. Ethical Consumer magazine has more to say about this here.

We work closely with a not-for-profit offset provider called Equiclimate - one of just four endorsed by the UK government.  This is how it works.

As part of the Kyoto Protocol the European Union (EU) has a fixed allocation of CO2 which is available for industry. Large companies have an allocation of carbon credits which can be traded on the market -- the so called Emissions Trading Scheme or ETS. The trading system has created a healthy carbon market and has enabled Europe's companies to save up to 100 million metric tons a year since 2005: an annual reduction of around 3.5 per cent.

Using Equiclimate we remove CO2 from the pool available to European industry straight away. We simply buy carbon credits on the open market, then "retire" them, so that they are not available for use by polluters. The system is straightforward, regulated at the highest level, verifiable and immediate. Still sceptical? Read this.

Choosing Canby bags means you are helping to cut carbon emissions right now, right here - where we can make an immediate difference. Because immediate action is what is needed.