Did you know we offset all our Co2 emissions?
We are often asked whether being eco-friendly is more costly than not caring about the environment. Whether it makes sense economically to care. If the whole effort is worth it? To this we usually ask back: Shouldn’t the question be if it works for us? Whether we are having fun being more eco-friendly? How our guests feel about the project? How it makes us feel? Why did we decide to base our business on the Triple Bottom Line; People, Planet & Profit?
We strongly believe that our business is not only about making money. We want to find a healthy balance between giving and taking. We are hoping to do the right thing for everyone and everything interconnected to our project. This means that we spend some money on things no public regulation or law forces us to. One of these things is the yearly offset of our carbon emissions.
After having done a major eco-renovation in 2014, factoring in everything we could to make sure our activity has the lowest possible impact on the environment without sacrificing the guests’ experiences, and fine tuning our daily activities to concept such as Zero Waste, durability and resource saving, we calculate our Co2 emissions every year and then plant enough trees to offset what we couldn’t avoid emitting.
We do this with the help of a local company called Bosques Sostenibles, through which we plant trees in the Cap de Creus National Park, 180km north of Barcelona. It is important for us to “act local, think global”, which is why we chose to work with Bosques Sostenibles, who offers the possibility to reforest areas of Catalonia. That way, we can take trips together with our guests and visit the trees. The trees are a mix of native ones such as pine, oak and cork.
The CO2 emission of our yearly activity tends to be around 2 tonnes, for which we plant 10 trees every year. This is the equivalent of a 13-watt CF lightbulb, lit for 17.56 years continuously. If this topic interests you, feel free to join us on our terrace for a chat and borrow some books on the subject from our library. Our favourite one is How Bad Are Bananas? The carbon footprint of everything by Mike Berners-Lee.
All photos are by Petz and Mari, taken during the latest visit to the Cap de Creus.