"As a company, we compensate the carbon footprints of all our products.
People's footprints can also be compensated. I turned 60 years in the summer, and received a gift from my company, which compensates my entire current journey in the world. My conscience is no longer burning, and this happened in moderation and without burning. How - my wife and our brand Primus motor will tell you in more detail as a visitor to my blog".
- Tapio
Operation "Finland's first carbon-neutral designer"
There are many kinds of birthday gifts, but if you want to give the recipient something particularly meaningful and long-lasting, coming up with a gift is a challenge. In the center of my reflection, quite wooden things were playing; woodman, king of the forest, Japanese wood symbol as a logo, wood as the main material of the collection. There are awards, recognitions and expertise in many fields and I thought, that he wouldn't need anything.
Then I got an absolutely brilliant idea. Last winter, our team created our own carbon footprint calculator for our collection and we ended up compensating the emissions of all products by planting trees. So you can only give such a woodman a certificate, and not just any wood certificate, but the "Finland's first carbon neutral designer" certificate.
When you have kilometers behind you from 60 years ago, it's interesting to think about the different stages of the life path and the emissions left behind. This particular path has passed through the increased standard of living and the spread of TVs in the 1960s, through the Keihäs trips of the 1970s, and from the 1980s "yuppie consumption party" towards the recession of the 1990s. The 21st century built a global bridge on this path, which brought the whole world to Tapio's home sofa. The path has gone from scarcity to individual choices and a new kind of shopping consumption, which changed the path to a highway. And if the 2020s hadn't put up a green responsibility sign next to that highway, this alternative gift would have hardly ever materialized or even occurred to me.
The implementation of the idea is supported by clean data about the average Finn, whose carbon footprint has been calculated at 13,500 CO2e/year. However, our hero of the day is not quite a basic-norm-average citizen, but a curious, experimental and hard-working individual. And what he does, he does to the fullest. However, this does not mean any extravagant feasting, being in saunas around the day and night or pointless, heavy-footed speeding. Living in a passive house and 25 years without red meat reduce the carbon footprint, while work-related travel and, of course, some hobbies also require an increase in the average Finnish calculation formula.
"One tree, depending on the species and place of growth, binds 750–1000 kg of carbon dioxide over the course of a hundred years."
Based on the facts I received, I calculated, rounding up a bit, that a 60-year-old tree has bound approx. 500 kg of carbon dioxide. This would mean compensating Tapio's 810,000 kg carbon footprint with 1,620 tree saplings. When I calculated the same with the amount of carbon dioxide bounded by a 100-year-old tree I mentioned earlier, the number of saplings needed was only 1000. It is easy to make calculations to compensate for a certain thing, for example the number of kilometers driven. The exact determination of one person's carbon footprint, on the other hand, seems to be still impossible, and therefore I ended up settling for a raised average formula. So let's start with 1000 tree saplings and increase the number if necessary.
The operation "Finland's first carbon-neutral designer" started last week. As a warm-up for the operation, we planted one hundred saplings in Hollola, on the edge of a cutting area of the Tiirismaa slope (60.98268° P, 25.54261° E). The dream is to be able to plant at least some of the operation's saplings in a wasteland, where they would not be cut down immediately after 60 years, but would be allowed to grow in peace. So let's search for a suitable wasteland! It is good to continue this in the spring of 2023.
On behalf of myself, the company and the entire team
- Arja
