London-based film lighting rental company Greenkit has joined the Webfleet Green Your Fleet initiative to help offset its fleet’s CO2 emissions.
Created with Webfleet’ sustainability partner Justdiggit, the Green Your Fleet programme gives customers an estimate of their fleet’s annual CO2 emissions, allowing them to offset their annual emissions by helping to re-green drylands in Africa.
Justdiggit is an NGO focusing on landscape restoration projects in Africa, particularly the re-greening of dry lands in East-Africa (Kenya and Tanzania) to positively impact climate, nature and people. Besides running their own projects, the NGO is scaling up the re-greening process by using communciation and technology to inspire and mobilise farmers all around the continent to start regreening their own land.
Greenkit already has a keen focus on environmental responsibility. The company specialises in energy efficient lights that give filmmakers an innovative and cost-effective alternative to traditional film lighting. The company’s Mitsubishi Outlander Gx is a hybrid – and the plan is to go fully electric with the company car and delivery van as soon as possible.
By joining the Green Your Fleet programme, it means that the 11,613kg of CO2 produced by Greenkit each year, will now be offset by the planting of 30 trees, saving 157,061 litres of water and re-greening 7,588m² of dry land.
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Although many African countries are actually getting enough rain, because of the hard, compacted top layer, the rain cannot enter the ground, adding to drier and hotter days all over the world. By digging eroded land, Justdiggit allows for rainwater to be harvested again and seeds to be grown, making the area much greener – and subsequently cooler – again.
“The UN has calculated that around 2 billion hectares of degraded land can be returned to a productive state in this way – that’s an area almost twice the size of Europe,” says Greenkit Marketing Director Sally McEnallay. “Although ours is small-scale action, we believe that in the long-term, this initiative will be extremely beneficial in tackling global climate change and it’s an important step for us on our journey to becoming a carbon-neutral company.”
Greenkit originally invested in the Webfleet telematics solution to improve customer service, as Sally explains:
“We work in a highly time-sensitive industry. Actors and film crews standing around waiting for kit can send production costs sky high, so it’s critical our clients know exactly when their lighting equipment will be arriving. With Webfleet, we know exactly where our vehicles are at any given time and can give our clients real-time updates on ETAs.
“The tech also helps us to navigate our way around traffic to minimise delays as we deliver to multiple shoot locations in a day. It’s been a massive time saver for us all round. With the most efficient routes we are also saving on fuel and CO2 emissions. Now the carbon offsetting initiative is a great way to go even a step further and use the data from these journeys in an ethically responsible way.”