Offsets are carbon credits that have been purchased from projects that are taking meaningful steps to decrease the carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere, with the goal of helping our planet and preventing climate change.
Zerofootprint secures carbon credits from a number of different sources that demonstrate effective and responsible means of reducing the CO2 emissions that lead to climate change. We attempt to keep our sources of credits as diversified as possible, and have an ongoing program of developing innovative and high quality offset projects.
Each project meets our 'blue-chip' selection criteria to ensure that:
All of our projects will be displayed on a Canadian Standards Association-managed GHG Registry, and have been independently audited and verified in accordance with a standard equivalent to ISO 14064.
This project utilizes used car and truck tires to manufacture a variety of products that include rubber carpets, car mats, new tires and an assortment of other post-consumer goods. Specifically designed technologies ensure the original characteristics of the rubber remain intact so as to retain the high quality of the final product after the recycling process.
This project reduces emissions it two ways: 1) recycling tires reduces the need to extract, and process synthetic rubber, a very energy and greenhouse gas intensive process; 2) tires that are not recycled in this area of Canada are burned, which is also a pollution intensive activity. Recycling tires avoids the greenhouse gas emissions associated with burning tires.
Coming Soon
Run-of-river power projects add clean energy to our grid, helping to lower our reliance on unsustainable sources of energy, such as fossil fuels and coal. This project uses the location of an old hydro dam – now an official heritage site – and harnesses the power of running river water to produce energy. This method avoids the damages involved in building a new dam, including flooding large tracts of land, or otherwise upsetting fragile ecosystems.
Projects such as these are sustainable, as they employ an entirely renewable energy source – a running river. Run-of-river projects are engineered so as to extract the natural power of a river without disrupting it, meaning that they exact only minimal strain on the ecosystem while generating significant amounts of power.
This project - located in Niagara Falls, Ontario - captures landfill gas from the East Quarry landfill and distributes it to a nearby plant that produces recycled content paper. Previously, all of this gas leaked into the atmosphere, where it played a significant role in perpetuating global warming. New amendments to the landfill have diverted these emissions, while simultaneously providing power to other facilities.
The captured landfill gas gets dehydrated and compressed, before it is transported to the nearby Abitibi mill. Here, it is used instead of natural gas, which offsets some of the energy requirements of this facility. The benefits are twofold: primary reductions are achieved by preventing gas release from the landfill, while secondary benefits come from displacing the use of natural gas.
The forest restoration project in Maple Ridge, British Columbia aims to create a forest that will continue to be healthy beyond the lifespan of the current generation of trees, maximize the amount of CO2 that can be sequestered (or absorbed), and emulate natural forest growth. Unlike reforestation - which generally applies to replacing a forest felled for the timber industry and involves mass plantations of a mono-crop – this kind of forestation ensures the specific needs of this forest have been factored into its long-term plan. This includes a diverse range of planted species, careful planning and attention to the future success of the biomass that the forest will support.
Forests play an important role as carbon sinks, essentially sequestering greenhouse gases from the air, and storing carbon in the biomass of the forest. Since the project began in 2006, it has sequestered over 220,000 tonnes of carbon credits in the District of Maple Ridge over an area of approximately 83 hectares. This involved the planting of over 36,000 indigenous Douglas Firs, Sitka Spruces, Western Red Cedars, Western Hemlocks and Cottonwoods.