At ECS Scotland we take our environmental impact seriously. Our Green Lead, Senior Teacher Lindsay Williams, has been tasked with creating a framework to help guide us in reducing our impact even more and creating a sustainable model for the future. Both for our language school business and for the beautiful environment around us.
Objective: to define a strategy to mitigate ECS Scotland students’ carbon impact from flights to and from Edinburgh
Problem: return flights from/to European cities produce around 600kg CO2
Solution: introduce a Climate Care Charge of £20 per booking, to be donated to the Woodland Trust for woodland regeneration and management
The Climate Care Charge will go towards The Woodland Trust's woodland regeneration and management.
Rationale for our Climate Care Charge
Students’ flights are the single biggest contributor to our carbon footprint, adding around 600kg CO2 per student flying from within Europe (the equivalent of the carbon sequestered by planting approximately 30 trees).
Students travelling from e.g. Tokyo each contribute approx. 2.6 tonnes of CO2.
In our bid to reduce our carbon footprint and improve our environmental credentials overall, we need to address this.
However, as a small organisation, offsetting is prohibitively complex. Therefore, we must find an alternative that will allow us to mitigate the carbon emissions from our students’ air travel.
The Woodland Trust states that ‘Every £100 donated will help us care for enough woodland to capture and store around four tonnes of carbon’. https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/support-us/give/personal-carbon/
Each £100 donation will mitigate for 5 students, including the larger carbon footprints of students travelling from outside Europe.
From January 2024, we have added a £20 Climate Care Charge to each booking. This CCC is donated to the Woodland Trust, a UK wide organisation, and Trees for Life a Scottish organisation.
Trees For Life continues our existing commitment to replanting the Caledonian forest here in Scotland. We will continue to collect donations in the school for students wishing to add extra contributions to this project. If you wish to plant a tree in our grove, you can do so easily here.
We will review this strategy annually, based on stakeholder feedback.
If you wish to discuss our strategy or have ideas for improvement, please get in touch with us to arrange a chat with Lindsay (our Green Lead and our guru for all things environment!).
Lindsay explaining the Climate Care Charge.
If you wish to calculate your own carbon footprint on your travel emissions, you can do so here: https://sustainabletravel.org/...
For clients travelling to Edinburgh by train, the Climate Care Charge will be deducted from the invoice. Please send us a copy of your train booking and receipt.
