Environment

How are we reducing our environmental impact?

Every human being and every other living thing we’ve ever discovered scoots and shimmies on, under and over the thin crust of a quite remarkable orb.

That orb is our home: Planet Earth, whizzing around our local star at 66,000 miles per hour. 

No wonder my hair and beard are so often ‘windswept and interesting’, as Billy Connolly puts it. 

Our home planet is quite remarkable, as anyone who has watched a single David Attenborough documentary will know. Or anyone who has watched an ant carry a twig, or seen the Himalayas, or listened to the trees in the wind, or watched fish scuttling up a woodland stream. 

But the natural world is under threat from us. We are changing our planet to such an extent that thousands of species are threatened. We are polluting our skies, lands and aquatic areas so much that we threaten the safety of billions of people. 

Reducing consumption

But rather like continuing to breathe and continuing to eat cake I, and you, need to reduce our negative impact on the planet and create more natural habitat for other life forms – even the wriggly or spiky or smelly or venomous ones that we often recoil from. They have a right to exist and thrive. 

Just like you, here at Chin Badger Media we have to consume things in order to function. We all need to eat and drink and be warm, we all need to travel, we all need tools in order to do our jobs. 

As a high tech company with cameras, microphones, lights, computers and all manner of bits of machinery which whirr and whizz and send electrons hither and thither, we actually have a higher environmental impact than many people leading a simpler less techie life. 

The reason for this is that high tech equipment has a particularly high environmental impact – from the minerals and plastics that make their electronic brains and bodies, to the exacting processes of production, to the careful packaging, to the journeys from where they were made, to the energy they consume during their lifetime, to the disposal and (hopefully) recycling of their valuable innards. 

At Chin Badger Media we need these tools to do our jobs, but we are constantly looking at how we can reduce our environmental impact. 

It starts with what we buy. Our main vehicle is electric, charged with electricity from a renewable energy company. We constantly look at every single area of our consumption and ask ourselves: do we really need it? If so, can we borrow or hire it? If not, can we buy second hand? And if that’s not sensible or possible, only then will we buy something that’s been newly manufactured in order to do our work. 

When we do buy stuff we usually use it until it has died, expired, kicked the bucket, and is utterly bereft of life. Then we recycle everything we can, from batteries to paper to textiles, to baked bean tins (I love baked beans on toast at lunchtime in the studio, I know, classy).

Making a contribution

But reducing the impact of our consumption isn’t enough to create and safeguard habitats for other species. 

We donate to environmental work for every single project we do. Over the past year we have done sixty nine professional video, photography and writing projects and donated £4 per project to plant 10 trees via the Tree Sisters programme to support community-led social change and reforestation. That’s 690 trees funded in 12 months. 

Click here find out more about Tree Sisters and the amazing work they do.

Having been trained as an environmental scientist, I am sceptical of many carbon offset schemes – so far. Not only can they be used by businesses as an excuse to keep on polluting, but I question how many of the schemes actually capture and draw down carbon in the long term. 

So instead of being part of any carbon offset scheme, we support Tree Sisters to plant trees in a sustainable way. 

So let us know what you think, and what you’re doing to improve your impact on the planet. What do you think we could do more of? 

It’s everyone’s planet. It’s everyone’s responsibility. It’s everyone’s privilege to do something that’ll make the planet something we can be proud of handing on to the future.