We say we do business while respecting Mama Earth. What do we mean and most importantly HOW?

Industrialization, while great for the development of societies, is very harmful to the environment in many different ways. Most businesses create waste and air and water emissions.

As you know, at Yoga Dept, we try to minimize our environmental impact. We choose brands that are making efforts towards a better earth and that get involved in their communities. We are mindful when packaging your orders; we choose materials like cardboard instead of plastic, we reuse what we can and we minimize our waste in all aspects of what we do. We also buy carbon offsets. That’s great, but what does that even mean?

Going Carbon Neutral

Climate change is a huge global problem that is caused primarily by carbon dioxide emissions. These come from fossil fuel; gaz, coal, oil. We create these emissions all the time in our everyday lives; by taking the plane, the car, switching on the lights, charging our phones, etc. It’s now vital that everyone takes action to reduce their carbon emissions as much as possible. While we can reduce them, it’s pretty much impossible to reduce to zero. That’s why people choose to go carbon neutral instead of zero carbon. And that’s where carbon offsets come into play: they are the tool to carbon neutrality.

What are Carbon Offsets?

Carbon offsets are a way to compensate for carbon emissions. When you produce carbon you can subtract it by purchasing carbon offsets. They are credits to cancel out harmful greenhouse gaz emitting activities that are achieved by investing in solar panels, wind power and energy efficiency projects. Basically, it’s doing something good to make up for the fact that you did something bad. The idea is that simple. Eventually, encouraging these projects will help make the switch to clean energy.

The purchase of these offsets benefits every party; while we are staying carbon neutral and feeling good about it, the project we invest in will create non-polluting energy which is important in the long run. You love the fact that getting your stuff didn’t result in more pollution and Mama Earth is thankful. Win-win-win-win.

At Yoga Dept

Yoga Dept being an online retailer, we produce carbon emissions by the shipment of your orders. Sadly, those delivery trucks are not super green. The best thing to do would be to switch to a green solution, but there isn’t one we could find; that teleporter-TV-thing from Charlie & the Chocolate Factory doesn’t exist just yet. What is advised then, is to cancel out our emissions by purchasing carbon offsets, which is exactly what we do! That’s how we stay carbon neutral and cancel out the negative environmental impact of our shipments.

Not all carbon offsets are created equal. It’s better to invest in projects that support sustainable energy versus tree planting projects for example. It’s also important to choose certified projects. We buy our offsets with LESS.ca and their projects are Gold Standard and VER+ certified. We calculate how much CO² we are responsible for and buy offsets by the tonne, accordingly.

Everyone can buy carbon offsets because we all create emissions by our everyday actions. With carbon offsets, it’s unbelievably easy to go carbon neutral when it’s not possible to reduce our emissions. If you haven’t already, you should watch Before the Flood, a documentary by National Geographic and Leonardo Dicaprio. We love him even more since then, and we now know more about climate change and carbon offsets.