Our environmental footprint

When Greenpeace was set up back in 1971, the issues we worked on were simple and self-contained: opposing nuclear testing and commercial whaling. We could be pretty confident that nothing we did as an organisation was adding to the problem!

Since then, as our range of campaigns has grown, and as our understanding of the impact of human activity on the environment has increased, the picture has become much more complex. We campaign against toxic pollution, but the chemicals responsible are in thousands of everyday products - often unlabelled - that we purchase in the course of our work. Our commitment to effective direct action means that we use ships, inflatable boats and road vehicles that run on fossil fuels. And as a global organisation, we have to fly.

This presents us with some real dilemmas. When we buy a new ship to help in our campaigns to protect the oceans, should we go for the most fuel-efficient one, or the one that will enable us to keep up with those plundering the riches of the deep and destroying marine life? Inevitably we end up striking a balance. We don't pretend to be perfect or pure.

It's also true to say that Greenpeace has not been a great advocate of the whole notion of environmental reporting and so-called corporate social responsibility. We believe that voluntary action will rarely deliver the outcomes we need, which is why we campaign for governments to introduce regulations and taxes to protect the environment. We tend to judge companies more by their stance on public policy - whether they support or try to block government action - rather than their own environmental performance.

Nevertheless, we accept that we will be judged in part on our own environmental performance. When we moved into our current office in 1991 we ensured that it was energy efficient. We installed a combined heat and power system and solar panels on the roof of the warehouse. We made sure that timber from sustainable sources was used for the windows, rather than toxic PVC windows. We use 100% post-consumer recycled paper, and have several composters in the garden. And as evidence of the impact of flying on the climate has mounted, we have been tightening rules about when and where we fly. First we banned any flights within the UK mainland or to Brussels or Paris. Then we extended this to Amsterdam, where our international headquarters are.

One final point: as an organisation we have a commitment to develop our offices in China, Brazil and India. This is essential to protect the global environment, particularly in the fight against global warming. But paradoxically, it means that we will need to fly more. We are therefore investigating ways of compensating for our flights through a carbon offset scheme. This does not mean planting trees, which is an unreliable and inadequate way of reducing carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. It means finding a scheme which can guarantee that emissions from other sources are reduced by an equivalent amount to the emissions from our flights. Information on this will be posted as soon as we have identified a suitable scheme.

Overall, we are committed to minimising the negative impact on the environment from our direct operations, while maximising the positive impact of our campaigning!