Saving the planet … one tree at a time  

The majority of the news on this website is focused on Touchstar products and services. It's nice to be able to highlight a new initiative from a valued supplier of ours, Oblong (UK) Ltd. The company are a provider of specialists lists for marketing purposes but they recently highlighted an entirely different venture to us that sparked our interest and is very much in keeping with our own stance on environmental issues. Oblong Trees is a not-for-profit initiative that helps individuals and organisations reduce their carbon footprint by committing to an effective and highly affordable tree planting scheme.  

Many of the statistics that Oblong quote in support of their initiative are simply staggering. For example a return flight from London to Athens creates 400kg of CO2 per person. It takes a grown tree 16 years to offset this amount of carbon. This does not include any of the CO2 cost to manufacture the plane, just purely for the flight. In its lifetime a Dell laptop creates 350kg of CO2. Carbon dioxide is a gas, it's extremely light (350kg is nearly 200 cubic metres of CO2). It takes one tree 40 years to absorb 1 tonne of CO2. It would take a grown tree 14 years to offset a Dell laptop!  

The UK creates 422 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Divided down, that's 6.5 tonnes of CO2 created per person. If each person planted 30 trees and let them mature then the UK would be carbon neutral. So what’s the solution? In simple terms, we need more trees! Oblong have created a 10 year affordable tree planting plan. Any business or individual joining the plan will have planted considerably more than their share of trees at the end of 10 years.  

Nursery facility in Malawi

Touchstar have already made a commitment to the scheme. Visit the website https://www.oblongtrees.com/ to read how you can do the same.   

Touchstar is constantly monitoring its carbon footprint and wider environmental responsibilities. We recently paused to contemplate the impact that our own products and solutions may be having. The bulk of our solutions are geared towards the automation of data capture and to encourage organisations to move to paperless operation. We concluded that going ‘paperless’ logically has to be better for the environment and that we could possibly even attempt to quantify this. If you’d like to discover more about our rationale and conclusions please visit the web page https://www.touchstarpod.com/blog/environmentalimpact .