To give you some ideas how you can make a quick attempt to start offsetting your carbon footprint for free, we’ve put together a few scenarios to help you see how easy it is to do your bit for the environment and offset some of your carbon footprint.

• Join Virgin Casino and donate £7 towards offsetting your carbon footprint for free!
• Join PartyPoker.com and donate £12.50 towards offsetting your carbon footprint for free!
• Sign up to Sky HD service and we will donate £50 towards carbon offsetting projects to help reduce your carbon footprint
• Sign up to Sky+ and we can claim back £40 towards offsetting your carbon footprint
• Buy your office stationery from OfficeGiant and we can claim back 6% of your total spend to put towards offsetting the carbon footprint of your workplace!
• Going on holiday can have a major impact on the environment. Flights are one of the single most damaging factors on our environment, and extraordinarily enough they don’t even factor in the Kyoto agreement for emissions targets. One single return flight from London to Australia can produce in the region of 3,782 kg of CO2 which costs about £52 to offset, according to some calculations. By getting your travel insurance from Churchill we are able to claim back £14 from Churchill that will go towards offsetting your holidays carbon footprint.
• Buy beautifully handmade Health and Beauty products from Green People that are 100% Natural and Certified Organic and you’ll not only be supporting a environmentally conscious company, but we can use a percentage of your shopping to help offset your carbon footprint.
• Looking for gift ideas? Shop at Firebox.com and we can claim back 5% of your shopping to donate to carbon offset projects.
• Want a new experience? Book an experience with Virgin experience days and we can claim back 6% of your total spend to contribute offsetting projects.

What will that get?

To help put the donations you generate into perspective here’s an idea of what you’ll be helping towards.

£20 pays for one Tonne of Cool

A Tonne Of Cool is a clever cocktail of environmental goodness that invests in energy reduction projects, alternative energy projects, allows you to spare the world at least one tonne of CO2 and helps us to put on more shows (carbon neutral of course) and make more programmes to make a bigger noise to get more people to do their bit to save the planet.

A Tonne of Cool is £20, and if you like things broken down, here’s a breakdown.

The biggest chunk, £10, goes to high quality alternative energy and energy reduction projects and means that you spare the world at least a tonne of CO2 (and if we could all spare a tonne, we would slow global warming significantly).

£4 gets invested in alternative energy technology companies to speed up the uptake of solar, wave, wind and biomass-generated power. Any long-term profit funds Global Cool’s long-term work because you can’t save a planet in a couple of months.

£3 goes to Global Cool Productions Ltd which allows our production people to put on more carbon-neutral shows and make more programmes to create a bigger noise to turn more people into planet-savers.

£2 goes to other clever climate change charities and campaigns. We all live on the same planet, it doesn’t matter who saves it and the more people who shake a stick, the bigger the stick.

£1 is an administration cost which isn’t interesting but needs to be there.

Read more about Global Cool on the Global Cool website.

£10 will help offset a long haul flight and could go towards planting tree’s in Schools in Northern Namibia

Flying Forest has recently planted trees in partnership with two schools in Namibia. The two schools are Okangororosa Combined School, Omuthiya and Omboto Primary School, both in Northern Namibia near the Etosha National Park.

There are 308 pupils at Okangororosa school and 280 at Omboto., 49% of the pupils at Okangororosa have lost one or both parents. The schools have planted a mix of trees including marula and acacia as well as wild plum, lemon and guava. The saplings are each surrounded by a ‘wigwam’ of branches to protect them from the sun and animals. The branches will be used for new saplings when these trees become established. The headmaster of Okangororosa school, Walter Hangula, says the trees were now “part of our family”. The teachers use the trees in their lessons on biology and the environment.

Discussions are under way about planting more trees and the setting up of a tree nursery. Both schools would welcome visitors and would be proud to show off their trees.

For more information please see the FlyingForest website.